SCALEHOUSE VOICES
Now in its Fourth season, Scalehouse Voices is a series of talks with local and visiting artists and scholars, exploring ideas and techniques, practice and process, creativity and culture. We feature fresh voices, perspectives, and ideas of nationally and internationally acclaimed artists, designers, and scholars.
Stay tuned for our 2022 Voices schedule.
Our last Voices' artist for 2021 featured V. Maldonado. In Maldonado's Artist Talk, Thinking With Your Hands and Listening with your Body, they will be discussing their career as an artist and the building of personhood through painting and drawing. Their work explores the elasticity of identity in a society that demands rigidity. As any individual's positionality and privilege in the world can author their character, Maldonado’s creative practice is designed to break societal molds to live more honest lives as humans and as artists. The process of thinking with one's own hands and listening with our bodies are wonderful acts of reclamation. Maldonado identifies as a queer Mexican American (Purépecha). Through their creative practice they seek dialogue, transformation, and renewal within contemporary society.
ABOUT V. MALDONADO
Maldonado was born in 1976 in Changuitiro, Michoacan, Mexico and grew up in the Central San Joaquin Valley of California in a family of migrant field laborers. Maldonado is currently the Director of Intercultural Engagement, Equity and Inclusion at Willamette University’s Pacific Northwest College of Art. In 2021, they became both Ombudsperson and Department Head of Painting. Maldonado received their BFA in Painting and Drawing from the California College of Art (2000), their MFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute in Chicago (2005), and is exclusively represented by the Froelick Gallery in Portland Oregon. Maldonado’s work is included in the permanent collections of the Portland Art Museum, the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at the University of Oregon, the Tacoma Art Museum, Tacoma, WA, the Museum of Fine Art, Houston, TX and the Hallie Ford Museum of Art, Salem, OR.
