Nora Valdez: ESPERANDO/WAITING
Boston Sculptors Gallery, Boston, MA • bostonsculptors.com • Through June 8, 2025
ESPERANDO/WAITING, Nora Valdez’ exhibition at Boston Sculptors Gallery leads the viewer on a journey that seems endless. The artist writes, “I realize I feel I’m always waiting . . . but for what? What exactly is it that I’m waiting for?” Originally from Argentina, Valdez has always felt suspended between two worlds.
Package, a particularly powerful installation, is an 8 x 10 foot drawing on two corners of a wall with a limestone sculpture of a woman’s torso atop a belted bundle. The torso is a metaphor for the artist’s self that she carries from place to place. The surrounding over life-sized drawings in black pastel pencil on the corner walls are figures in waiting—unwitting witnesses to the passage of Package—as anonymous as immigrants who can never be sure how they will be treated. A grey granite column to the right with a drawing of a face entitled My mother’s words includes words in Spanish, “Te espere y nunca regresaste.” “I wait for you, and you never come.”
On an opposite wall is a grid of ten ink drawings set in white hand-carved wood frames from Cuzco, Peru. The series, Esperando/Waiting, is drawn directly onto pages of an old book of Gustave Dore etchings. There is a powerful dialogue between the journeying figures and the delicately etched scenes, as if alluding to the continuity of the human journey yet not bound by time.
In addition to the installation and drawings, there are several limestone carvings of figures huddled together as if seeking protection, and a circle of child-sized white chairs with hands holding each other. Another wall shows photographs of Valdez’ numerous public art sculptures.
This sense of “waiting” is something that is shared amongst many people today. Valdez’s ability to infuse these drawings and sculptures with a sense of life passage is uncanny. Such work can only emanate from deeply held questions. This is a rare, emotionally full exhibition, one that gives voice to the questions that many of us live with daily. Perhaps there is comfort in seeing a reflection of shared feelings expressed in a most sensitive manner.
—B. Amore