Leo Valledor

{{Infobox person | name = Leo Valledor | alt = Leo Valledor | birth_date = {{Birth year|1936}} | birth_place = Fillmore District, San Francisco, California, US | death_date = {{Death year and age|1989|1936}} | death_place = San Francisco, California, US | alma_mater = San Francisco Art Institute | years_active = 1953–1989 | style = hard-edge painting, minimalism }}

'''Leo Valledor''' (1936 – 1989)<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.sfmoma.org/artist/Leo_Valledor|title=Leo Valledor|website=SFMOMA|language=en|access-date=2018-02-07}}</ref> was a Filipino-American painter who pioneered the hard-edge painting style. During the 1960s he was a member of the Park Place Gallery in SoHo, New York City, which exhibited many influential and significant artists of the period. He was a leader of the minimalist movement in the 1970s.

== Early life and education ==

Valledor was born in 1936, in Fillmore district, San Francisco. His close friend, who he often referred to as "cousin," was San Francisco artist Carlos Villa.<ref>{{Cite web |last=Haddad |first=Natalie |last2=Yau |first2=John |date=2023-10-03 |title=The Filipino-American Friends Who Forged New Artistic Paths |url=https://hyperallergic.com/848467/the-filipino-american-friends-who-forged-new-artistic-paths/ |access-date=2025-04-22 |website=Hyperallergic |language=en-US}}</ref><ref>{{Cite news|url=http://www.sfgate.com/entertainment/article/A-hidden-legacy-of-Asian-art-3129555.php|title=A hidden legacy of Asian art|work=SFGate|access-date=2018-02-07}}</ref>

From 1953 until 1955, Valledor was a student at the California School of Fine Arts (known currently as San Francisco Art Institute) under auspices of a scholarship.<ref name="ReferenceA">Rinder, Lawrence "Everything Pellucid: The Paintings of Leo Valledor" Leo Valledor: Selected Works, 2006</ref> However, as art historian Paul J. Karlstrom wrote, "Despite a year as a scholarship student at CSFA, Valledor was largely self-taught, but he was gifted and quickly developed a gestural abstract style reflecting the influence of Mark Tobey.{{Citation needed|date=February 2018}} In addition to Tobey, his earliest influences were Paul Klee, Arshile Gorky, and Bradley Walker Tomlin."<ref>Karlstrom, Paul J. "Valledor and Villa: Separate Artistic Roads to Identity" Asian American Art: Starting from Here Stanford University Press, 2008.</ref>

== Career == In 1955, he had his first solo show "Compositions" at the historical Six Gallery. He showed his "Black and Blue Series."<ref>Karlstrom, Paul J. "Valledor and Villa: Separate Artistic Roads to Identity" Asian American Art: Starting from Here Stanford University Press, 2008</ref>

When he moved to New York City in 1961 he became a member of the influential Park Place Gallery in SoHo, Manhattan, further delving into his avant garde interests of minimalism and conceptualism. It was considered the first gallery in SoHo, and included artists like Edwin Ruda, Mark di Suvero, Peter Forakis, and Forrest Myers.<ref name="ReferenceA" />

In New York at the Kaymar Gallery in March and April 1964 Valledor also exhibited with Sol LeWitt and Donald Judd.<ref>Humblet, Claudine, La Nouvelle Abstraction Americaine 1950-1970: Troisieme Tome. Neil Williams Estate, 2003 p. 1903</ref> He also had a solo show at the Graham Gallery on Madison Avenue in New York City. In 1968, Valledor left New York returning to San Francisco.<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://www.askart.com/artist_bio/Leo_Valledor/101405/Leo_Valledor.aspx|title=Leo Valledor - Artist Biography for Leo Valledor|website=www.askart.com|access-date=2018-02-07}}</ref> He exhibited there at such establishments as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the San Francisco Art Institute.<ref name="ReferenceB">"Career" Leo Valledor: Selected Works, 2006</ref> He was at the vanguard of the minimalist painting movement in the mid 1970s, and later in the seventies he exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Daniel Weinberg Gallery, M. H. de Young Memorial Museum, and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art.<ref name="ReferenceB" />

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Valledor became the Art Exhibition Director and teacher at Lone Mountain College in San Francisco. He was a guest teacher at the University of California, Berkeley. He created a roof mural for the Department of Public Works approved by the San Francisco Arts Commission. He received his first National Endowment for the Arts Artist Fellowship Grant in 1981, and received another grant in 1982. In the eighties he received a California Arts Council artist-in-residence grant in the South of Market community. He also taught at the San Francisco Art Institute. He lived in San Francisco until his death in 1989, aged 52 or 53.<ref>"Career"Leo Valledor: Selected Works, 2006</ref><ref>{{Cite news|url=https://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/27/style/weddings-diane-shaw-rio-valledor.html|title=WEDDINGS; Diane Shaw, Rio Valledor|date=2001-05-27|work=The New York Times|access-date=2018-02-07|language=en-US|issn=0362-4331}}</ref>

== Legacy ==

Art critics have placed his work in context with the work of Ellsworth Kelly, Barnett Newman, and Leon Polk Smith.<ref name="togonongallery.com">{{Cite web|url=http://www.togonongallery.com/artists/artists_leovalledor.html|title = Togonon Gallery}}</ref> Other art historians, like Frances Colpitt, have found his work to be in relation to Frank Stella. Colpitt states, "Less assimilable to Op art experiments of the early 1960s, Valledor's shaped canvases are more reminiscent of Frank Stella's contemporaneous work... But ''Skeedo (1965)'' is so quirky and radically shaped that it seems without precedent..."<ref>Colpitt, Frances "Affiliations: Space Explorers" p. 64 Art in America, February 2009</ref> Art critic Knute Stiles reviewed Valledor's shows in San Francisco in the 1976: "He is one of a dozen modernists who subscribe to one or another of the subgroups of what might be called ''International Style Geometric abstraction.'' His work has a classical or pure form-oriented bent, but in the early '60s he emerged as a pioneer of the Minimalism which was to dominate that decade."<ref>Stiles, Knute Art in America November, December, 1976 "Between Sound & Space: The Paintings of Leo Valledor from 1959-1989" Leo Valledor exhibition October 4-November 8, 2008 at the Togonon Gallery</ref> Valledor's work explores the juxtapositions of colors and geometric forms as metaphors for the interplay of elements in the natural world, as Lawrence Rinder explains:<blockquote> We all know that at one time (especially in San Francisco) jazz, abstract expressionism and what's known as Beat poetry were all part of one culture. It may be a cliche but it was a powerful reality. One thing helped to explain the other: one thought, different languages. I can imagine how great Leo must have felt to show his art at the Six Gallery in 1955... the same year Ginsberg first read his culture-shaking poem Howl. Where Leo's art gets hard for some is right where it ought to get easy. Abandoning the gestural language of abstract expressionism (which would linger in the Bay Area for decades), he started to explore reduced palettes, geometric shapes, and the spatial dimension of color. This wasn't the end of his dive into the jazz-like spirit, it was the beginning. Geometry was his style and color was his tone.<ref name="ReferenceA"/> </blockquote> Valledor's work is in the collections of the Achenbach Collection of San Francisco, M.H. de Young Memorial Museum, Oakland Museum of California, Seattle Art Museum, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Crocker Art Museum, National Gallery of Art, Yale University Art Gallery, St. Louis Art Museum, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Allentown Art Museum.<ref name="togonongallery.com"/> and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art<ref name="togonongallery.com"/>

==References== {{Reflist}}

==External links== * [https://valledor-estate.blogspot.com/ Leo Valledor estate] * [http://www.robertsmithson.com/essays/entropy Robert Smithson comments]{{dead link|date=September 2024|bot=medic}} * [http://www.aaa.si.edu/exhibits/paulacooper/ Archives of American Art]

{{DEFAULTSORT:Valledor, Leo}} Category:20th-century American painters Category:20th-century American male artists Category:American male painters Category:University of San Francisco faculty Category:1936 births Category:1989 deaths Category:San Francisco Art Institute faculty Category:Painters from San Francisco