Born in Harlem, New York, Valerie J. Maynard (1937 – 2022) was a sculptor, printmaker, designer, and teacher. Maynard’s practice centered Black identity and experience, exploring themes of social inequity and the development of the Civil Rights Movement. As her lifelong friend Nikki Finney stated in an essay for the BMA’s 2020 exhibition catalog, Valerie Maynard: Lost and Found, “It is 1969 and Valerie Maynard is approximately 32 years old and this moment is a thin paper artifact illuminating what her work has been about and will continue to be about based on her abiding love of blackness, its familial culture, its street scriptures, its ancient African value systems that stretch unbroken across the sea.”
Maynard would become the first artist-in-residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem, where she established their printmaking workshop and was a pioneering member of the Black Arts Movement. She later moved to Baltimore, becoming an integral part of the city’s arts community. Her many public artworks include the glass mosaic installation Polyrhythmics of Consciousness and Light (2003) at the 125th Street/Lexington Avenue subway station in New York City. In 2020, the BMA opened Valerie Maynard: Lost and Found, a focused retrospective of her work that featured selected works from her landmark series No Apartheid from the 1980s and 1990s. Maynard’s work is held in the collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum, Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, National Art Museum of Mozambique, and the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. In addition to her artistic practice, Maynard was an admired teacher, who taught at Howard University, University of the Virgin Islands, and Baltimore School for the Arts.
Source: Baltimore Museum of Art and Valerie J. Maynard Foundation
