solo presentation by Paloma Valencia
EXPO Chicago
Navy Pier Festival Hall, Chicago, IL | Booth 250
April 24 – 27, 2025
YoungArts is proud to present Bueno, Bonito, y Barato, a solo exhibition by printmaker Paloma Valencia (2015 Winner with Distinction in Visual Arts). Bueno, Bonito, y Barato will entail a new body of work that analyzes and recontextualizes our built environment by focusing on the familiar, unassuming spaces that form the backdrop of everyday life in the American Midwest. The title, a colloquial adage from her Cuban-American upbringing meaning ‘Good, Pretty, and Cheap,’ reflects the simplicity, accessibility, and familiarity of the local businesses she documents—diners, gas stations, and motels that hold deep cultural significance but are often overlooked. These storefronts, which shape the cultural landscape and image of Chicago, are vanishing as urban development reshapes the city, erasing their facades and the narratives held within.
Born and raised in Miami, Valencia gravitates toward the visual language of commercial architecture, focusing on food service and hospitality in cities shaped by boomtown dynamics and car culture unique to the US. Drawing from her experience working in restaurants and her family’s history as immigrant workers in casinos and hotels, she infuses her work with a deep understanding and careful observation of her subjects. She employs traditional printmaking methods, manual architectural drafting, and disposable film photography to document the intricacies and interwoven histories of these sites. She brings a critical eye to architecture’s complicated relationship with permanence.
The pieces in Bueno, Bonito, y Barato are a meditation on the fragility of urban neighborhoods and the working communities they serve. The prints personify the familiar visual motifs of roadside businesses—dynamic typography, utilitarian materials, and a design language rooted in the Futurist optimism and convenience of consumerism. The craft-focused and physical image-making processes used in her practice mirror the histories of unseen work synonymous with these businesses, allowing her to deepen her connection to the structures, people, and labor they embody. She asserts that transient, everyday locations, much like the people who sustain them, warrant similar acts of reverence, underscoring their significance within the city’s cultural fabric. Through intentional linework and a multi-layered approach to works on paper, Valencia renders these storefronts and interiors with the same dedication typically reserved for monuments.
For Bueno, Bonito, y Barato, Valencia expands on these transient landscapes in a new body of work that builds upon her printmaking practice. Along with a new series of prints, Valencia will create a large-format book that combines disposable camera photography with screen-printed drawings and linocut typography in a tactile form. The quiet stories embedded within the iconic brick and concrete scenes of Chicago are amplified with color, variation, and scale that presents them as evolving metropolitan ecosystems. Valencia’s work asks viewers to observe the built environment and how it shapes culture and people. Whether it is a neighborhood staple or an unexplored city block, Valencia captures fleeting moments that define American urban life.
As these familiar community establishments make way for luxury housing developments, Bueno, Bonito, y Barato poses questions about the future of cultural meeting places and the evolving identity of cities like Chicago. Paloma Valencia preserves these disappearing landmarks by working against the inevitable forces of change, leaving behind a visual archive of the city in flux.