May, 2026

Several exhibitions are wrapping this month: my solo presentation at the Allentown Art Museum, Amanda Valdez: Aftertouch, and the 10 Year Anniversary exhibition at the Landing Gallery. Back in the studio, I’m turning toward a new body of work—testing new palettes in my naturally dyed fabrics, shifting my approach to sewing through a more responsive kind of assemblage, and returning to block printing. It all feels fresh and exciting, like the momentum of spring itself.

It was a pleasure to present a new artist talk at the museum last month, tracing the influences that shape the work, walking through the processes that unfold as a painting is built, and mapping its development across the last fifteen years. No work emerges in isolation, and I wanted to use the talk to acknowledge the larger material and historical world the studio draws from. There is still more to refine, but it was a deeply useful exercise.

FINAL WEEK: Amanda Valdez: Aftertouch at the Allentown Art Museum

Amanda Valdez: Aftertouch

Allentown Art Museum

Allentown, Pennsylvania 

Closing May 17th

A collection of 20 works examining a period of five years of art making. 

Amanda Valdez: Aftertouch at the Allentown Art Museum, Allentown, Pennsylvania

Epic Audio

I just finished all 36 hours of Lonesome Dove and am left with that familiar grief that follows a truly immersive novel: the strange loss of characters whose company has become part of your days. Gus, Call, Lorena, Newt—and just as vividly, the landscape itself—are difficult to leave behind. Soulfully narrated by Will Patton, Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry’s Pulitzer Prize–winning 1985 novel, set in the 1870s, wrestles with questions that feel as contemporary as they are historical: what is lost when expansion bears down on land and the people shaped by it, what remains of the

mythology of the American West once its violence is laid bare, and whether honor is a meaningful moral code or simply another mechanism of distance.

The novel follows two retired Texas Rangers, Captain Woodrow Call and Captain Augustus McCrae, as they leave the small border town of Lonesome Dove and drive a cattle herd north to Montana, chasing the idea of a life not yet lived. What unfolds is vast and unsentimental: an epic of hardship, longing, accident, intimacy, and the unpredictable ways people fail and care for one another. McMurtry is as interested in the brutality of conquest as he is in the fragile emotional codes his characters live by, and the novel’s scale never comes at the expense of its tenderness.

I grew up with the four-part made-for-television VHS box set on our shelf and have no memory of ever watching it. The cast roll-call feels reason enough to return to it: Robert Duvall, Tommy Lee Jones, Diane Lane, Anjelica Huston, Danny Glover, and more. By all accounts, the adaptation is excellent. I suspect I’m not finished with this one yet.

Book of the Month

Dead and Alive: Essays by Zadie Smith

I’ve recently picked up several versions of a familiar format: the esteemed writer’s essay collection. Too often they can feel staccato—jumping from subject to subject, mode to mode—never fully allowing you to settle into the thinking. Dead & Alive by Zadie Smith rises above that trap. She is one of the few writers I’ll happily follow anywhere: British politics, sure. An elegy for Joan Didion or Toni Morrison, obvs. A close reading of Tár, also yes.

In Part II, “Considering,” the essay “Some Notes on Mediated Time” resonated so deeply that I haven’t stopped talking about it to whoever will listen: my husband, my baseball mom friend at practice, my coworker. It is the kind of essay that makes you want to reread it immediately, not to clarify its argument, but to keep pace with the precision of its thinking. If I were teaching at the college level, I would undoubtedly work it into my syllabus, just to spend more time with it.

From the Archive

The Shore,  2025  Embroidery, hand-dyed fabric, and canvas, 24 x 20 inches