Alexandria Valentine (b. 1996) is a South Side Chicago-born artist who creates collages, photographs, texts, and screen prints. Inspired by the pastoral and the speculative, Valentine explores concepts of hybridity and the land as spiritual conduits informing our emotions, histories, and futures. She utilizes archival images, cultural ephemera, her personal archive, and public archives to study Black Americans’ complicated relationship with the natural and constructed world.

Alexandria received a Master of Fine Arts from Columbia University School of the Arts and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. They co-found North Star Memory Project, a transmedia archive that prioritizes Black Chicago and Great Migration histories through the counter-archive building.

Sometimes my work is thought out and planned; other times, I use it to emotionally process the moment.