Claudia Valenti is a multidisciplinary artist working in painting, drawing, printmaking, and ceramic sculpture. Her work employs magical realism to explore memory, loss, comfort, anxiety, and how the perception of identity is crafted through real and imagined senses of place, bodies, and secrets. In Valenti’s work, liminal spaces are navigated through the early hours by animals native to her birthplace; the edge of the forest’s shadow creeps towards and from their bodies; the hands of ghosts attempt to stave off pain, contemplation, or doom. The folkloric happenings and crafted objects operate as archetypal vessels for the viewer to fill with the rites of remembrance and the complicated human feelings that demand divination. Quietly, observances are performed, by both them and us.
Valenti received a BFA from Montserrat College of Art and an MFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Her work has been exhibited across the East Coast and internationally. She has received grants for her work and research from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Fine Arts Venture Fund, the San Juan Preservation Trust for a residency in the San Juan Islands (WA), and most recently, from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, for a residency in Tokyo and Osaka, Japan, to study the semiotic use of animals in Japanese art and architecture. Her debut solo exhibition, The Other Room, was held in the Schlosberg Gallery at Montserrat College of Art in 2025.
Valenti is an Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Arts at Montserrat College of Art and lives, teaches, and works in the Boston area.