Location: Napa Valley, CA
Medium: Painting, textile, installation
Website: correavalencia.com
Arleene Correa Valencia was born in 1993 in Arteaga, Michoacán, Mexico. Her family fled to the United States in 1997 and settled in California's Napa Valley, where she grew up among the agricultural working community that would later become the primary subject of her art. A beneficiary of DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals), her identity as an undocumented immigrant is central to her practice — not as a limitation, but as a source of political urgency and creative fuel.
She received her BFA and MFA from the California College of the Arts in San Francisco. She is an inaugural recipient of the Bay Area Fellowship at Headlands Center for the Arts and a 2023 Eureka Fellow of the Fleishhacker Foundation. A KQED Arts documentary about her work, REPRESENT: Portraits of Napa Workers, won a regional Emmy Award. She has been represented by Catharine Clark Gallery in San Francisco since 2022.
Correa Valencia works primarily in painting, textile, and installation, often combining all three within a single work. She paints on handmade amate paper — a traditional bark paper made by artisans in San Pablito, Mexico — and incorporates repurposed domestic fabrics, remnants of clothing worn by people who have experienced family separation, and embroidery contributed by family members. The result is work that is simultaneously intimate and archival, functioning like a codex: a visual record of migration, survival, and belonging in the tradition of pre-Columbian Indigenous historiography.
Her works make invisible communities visible — literally. Several pieces use UV-reactive materials that reveal hidden figures and connections only when exposed to black light, making the experience of invisibility felt by undocumented people a physical and perceptual event for the viewer. Her palette is rich and warm, drawn from the colors of Michoacán, while her figures are rendered with dignity and specificity that resists both sentimentality and victimhood.
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