Alejandro Valencia
Bio: Alejandro Valencia’s practice investigates the processes of political alchemy that disrupt and reconfigure power, history, and identity. Approaching history as a malleable material rather than a fixed narrative, Valencia examines dissent and consensus as forces that shape the transformation of individual, cultural, and collective identities.
Informed by his experiences of cultural and geographical migration, Valencia employs mestizaje as a method of joining, weaving, and remixing space, language, image, material, and context to produce works in which meanings are not settled but remain unstable, contested, and unresolved.
Valencia earned his BFA from the New World School of the Arts (2017) and will earn his MFA from Columbia University (2026). He pursued advanced research in Memory Studies at Universidad de Antioquia (2020) and in Political Aesthetics at Universidad Jorge Tadeo Lozano (2021) in Colombia. He was nominated for the Sara Modiano Contemporary Artist Award (2022) and the Harpo Foundation Emerging Artist Fellowship (2017), and is the co-founder of colectivo, an artist collective dedicated to exploring DIY culture in the Global South, and of NOMUSEO, a curatorial research initiative based in Manizales, Colombia.
He lives and works between New York, Miami, and Manizales.
First Year Exhibition
Alejandro Valencia
Memphis Tunic (Black Saints Go Marching in), 2025
Repurposed industrial bags, caution tape, danger tape, electric tape, painter’s tape, packing tape, printed matter, plexiglass, copper, gold chain, soil from Cuba, rattles, and adidas shoe
Courtesy of the artist
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Dissident Antena (Mahmoud’s Scepter), 2025
Reclaimed poster, printed matter, silkscreen on newspaper plexiglass, and wood
Courtesy of the artist