Aldrin Valdez
Aldrin Valdez is a Pinoy writer and visual artist. They grew up in Manila and Long Island and currently live in Brooklyn. Aldrin has been awarded fellowships from Queer/Art/Mentorship and Poets House. Their poetry & visual art appear in The Felt, Femmescapes, Nat Brut, Poor Claudia, and The Recluse. Collaborating with writer & organizer Ted Kerr, Aldrin co-organized Foundational Sharing (2011-2015), a salon series of readings, performances, & visual art. Most recently, they’ve co-curated two seasons of the Segue Reading Series with fellow poet Joël Díaz.
RHETORICAL POSITIONING OF YOURSELF what kind of writer are you? Maxe told me: you love language for the same reason you love people
By Phong H. Bui, Suzanne Brancaccio, Noah Dillon, Caroline Dumalin, Margaret Graham, Marco Greco, Juliet Helmke, Ambereen Karamat, Nayun Lee, Aldrin Valdez, and Tom Winchester
George Gittoes was recently able to set aside some time for an extended conversation with Railpublisher Phong Bui and his students in the MFA Art Criticism and Writing program at the School of Visual Arts, via Skype from Pakistan.
Louis I. Kahn (1901–1974) saw the architectural plan as “a society of rooms,” in which each individual space is connected to the other in a dialogue of light and shadow, intimate and sensitive. The ideal place, he said, is one where it is “good to learn, good to work, and good to live” in.
An engraver’s plate synthesizes image, mark, and idea into one matrix. You can think of it as a kind of drawing that is more visceral and direct, aspiring to sculpture, as a needle extends the hand’s gesture or sometimes, in the case of aquatints, as acid is used to brand the image.
By Aldrin Valdez, Ambereen Karamat, Juliet Helmke, Noah Dillon, Margaret Graham, Taylor Bell, Tom Winchester, Suzanne Brancaccio, Nayun Lee, Marco Greco, Jillann Hertel DelTejo, and Caroline Dumalin
On the occasion of his recent solo exhibition To New York With Love at James Fuentes Gallery, Jonas Mekas, the indefatigable advocate of American independent cinema, graciously took the time out of his busy schedule to meet with the graduate students of the Art Criticism and Writing program at the School of Visual Arts for an in-depth conversation.
