The work of Deborah Valoma, artist and Associate Professor of Textiles and Graduate Fine Arts at the California College of the Arts (CCA) in San Francisco and Oakland, California will be featured in browngrotta arts‘ display at SOFA New York. Valoma has dedicated her artistic and academic career to the medium of textiles—to advancing its historical legacy, cultural meanings, and artistic potential.In 1978, Valoma graduated Summa Cum Laude and Phi Beta Kappa from the University of California at Berkeley with a Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology. In 1995, she earned a Master of Fine Arts in Textiles with High Distinction from CCA.  Valoma served as CCA’s Director of Fine Art from 2008 to 2011. She will return to the position of  Chair of the Textiles Program at CCA , which she heldfrom 2005 to 2008, this Fall. “Intensely research based,” Valoma says, “my creative work hugs the edges of tradition, simultaneously upholding age-old custom and unraveling long-held stereotypes of the genre.” At SOFA, browngrotta arts will display Femininity, in which Valoma reworks – literally — Sigmund Freud’s observation that women have made few contributions to civilization except as weavers, and that only because of an obsession with their pubic hair. “As I painstakingly wove Sigmund Freud’s infamous quote letter by letter,” Valoma explains, “my hands caressed the words in an ironic, yet fierce, gesture of unwriting.”

Valoma’s work has been exhibited at the Textile Museum, Washington, D.C.; Los Angeles County Museum of Art ; De Young Museum of Art, San Francisco, California; Blanden Memorial Art Museum, Iowa; Gulbenkin Foundation, Lisbon, Portugal; Oliver Art Center, California College of Arts and Crafts, Oakland; North Carolina State University Museum, Raleigh; Hoffman Gallery, Oregon School of Arts and Crafts, Portland; Ginza Art Space, Tokyo, Japan; and Montclair State University, New Jersey .