Valerie Jaudon

Valerie Jaudon was born in Greenville, Mississippi and studied at Mississippi University for Women (1963–1965), Memphis Academy of Art (1965), University of the Americas in Mexico City (1966–1967), and Central Saint Martins College of Arts and Design in London (1968–1969).^[5][6]

Valerie Jaudon is an original member of the Pattern and Decoration movement.^[1] Her art has been written about consistently in books, journals, magazines, newspapers, and catalogs. She is the co-author, with Joyce Kozloff, of the widely anthologized Art Hysterical Notions of Progress and Culture (1978), in which she and Kozloff explained how they thought sexist and racist assumptions underlaid Western art history discourse. They reasserted the value of ornamentation and aesthetic beauty - qualities assigned to the feminine sphere.^{[7][8][9][10]}

In 2011 Jaudon was elected to the National Academy of Design.^[2]

Since 1987 Valerie Jaudon has taught at Hunter College of the City University of New York, where she is Professor of Art.^[2]

Jaudon has had numerous solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally. She began her early career in New York with the group exhibition, "76 Jefferson Street," at the Museum of Modern Art in 1975,^[1] featuring artists who had lived and worked in the 1893 loft building near the East River and the Manhattan Bridge, an area on the Lower East Side which began to attract artists and musicians in the mid-1950s.^[11]

She was one of the original painters of the Pattern and Decoration movements of the 1970s. The group began exhibiting together in 1976 in "Ten Approaches to the Decorative" at the Alessandra Gallery in New York,^[12] followed by "Pattern Painting" in 1977 at PS1 in Long Island City, Queens.^[13] Subsequently, over fifty group exhibitions featuring the founding artists were held in museums and galleries in Europe and the U.S. including the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Art Institute of Chicago, Palais des Beaux Arts, Brussels, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebaeck, Denmark, the Neue Galerie, in Aachen, Germany, the Pori Art Museum, the Mayor Gallery in London, Modern Art Oxford, and the Hudson River Museum in Yonkers, New York.^[14]

In 2012 Jaudon was both included and involved with organizing a re-staging of the seminal group exhibition "Conceptual Abstraction", a survey of twenty contemporary abstract painters, at Hunter College Galleries curated by Joachim Pissarro and Pepe Karmel. The original exhibition, for which Jaudon was credited with coining the name "Conceptual Abstraction", took place in 1991 at the Sidney Janis Gallery.^[15][16]

Jaudon's first solo painting exhibition was at the Holly Solomon Gallery in New York in 1977 with further exhibitions in 1978, 1979 and 1981. The Sidney Janis Gallery represented her from 1982 until 1999 (until the gallery's closing), with solo exhibitions in 1983, 1985, 1986, 1988, 1990, 1993 and 1996. The Von Lintel Gallery in New York, now in Los Angeles, represented her starting in 2002, with solo exhibitions in 2003, 2005, 2008, 2010, 2012, and 2016. She is also currently represented in New York by DC Moore Gallery, with solo exhibitions in 2014, 2015, and 2020.^[6]

Other solo exhibitions include: Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (1977); Galerie Bischofsberger, Zurich (1979); Hans Strelow Gallery, Düsseldorf (1980); Corcoran Gallery, Los Angeles (1981); Quadrat Museum, Bottrop, Germany (1983); Amerika Haus, Berlin (1983); McIntosh/Drysdale Gallery, Washington D.C. (1985); the Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson] (1996); Stadel Museum, Frankfurt (1999); University of Mississippi Museum, Oxford (2011).^[5][6]