ABOUT THE ARTIST

Rita Valley lives and works in Connecticut, USA. She is a mixed media artist preoccupied with issues of economics, income disparity, body image, politics, and the random household appliance. The physical expression of her work often takes the form of large-scale fabric banners, and she also makes installations and collages. She uses text — short phrases or words — that are often culled from the headlines or zeitgeist to engage with the most pressing social issues in her labor-intensive sew works.

Even though she was outspoken and political from a young age, she did not espouse her political activism in her practice as an artist until later. She studied abstract painting in college — first at Bard, then Bennington. When she switched from painting to collage, Rita began to notice the constricted way that women were — and are — portrayed in the media. Her artwork has adopted a more pointed tone since then.

She sources the fabrics for her crazy quilts or banners from anywhere. Friends often donate scraps to her, and her partner, artist Bob Keating, also has a keen eye for picking out patterns that will integrate well into her meticulously-constructed fabric paintings. Layering designs and textures, Valley’s pieces recall the skills she first learned as a painter, but with more bite.

The deeper the United States plunge into chaos, the more Rita feels called to use her artwork to inspire action.

She has received two State of Connecticut Individual Artist Grants and recently was commissioned by a collaboration between Yale University Art Gallery and Artspace (New Haven) to create an original artist’s book, Better Guns and Gardens. Her work has recently been shown at Odetta Gallery in Brooklyn.

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