Leo Valledor

Leo Valledor (1935–1989) 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 exhibited in several prominent galleries and museums, like the Graham Gallery, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum. He was the Exhibition Director and teacher at Lone Mountain College. He is a two-time recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Artist Fellowship Grant. He was a leader of the minimalist movement in the 1970s.

Leo Valledor was born and raised in the Fillmore district of San Francisco. He was a student at the California School of Fine Arts from 1953 to 1955 under auspices of a scholarship, however, as art historian Paul J. Karlstrom writes, "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. In addition to Tobey, his earliest influences were Paul Klee, Arshile Gorky, and Bradley Walker Tomlin." At the age of 19 in 1955 he had his first solo show "Compositions" at the historical Six Gallery. He showed his "Black and Blue Series." When he moved to New York City in 1961 he became a member of the influential Park Place Gallery in SoHo, 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.

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