Leo Valledor’s Spatial Politics: Buddhist Epistemologies and the Park Place Group

During his involvement with the Park Place Group in Lower Manhattan in the 1960s, Leo Valledor (1936-1989) began producing hard-edge paintings that engage with the social and conceptual possibilities of color. As a means of spatializing racial and geographic relationships, Valledor’s color contingencies play out in the perceptual field with the intention of transforming public consciousness. Immersed in multiple forms of Buddhist and non-western thought during his early career in San Francisco’s Beat scene, Valledor’s abstraction rejected western epistemologies from the outset which inflected the foundational beliefs of the Park Place Group. Following the work of scholars Anna Chave and Linda Dalrymple Henderson, I will argue that the Park Place Group’s insistence on the spiritual and political potential of illusory and unknown space and “the fourth dimension” led to a series of debates with Minimalist artists such as Donald Judd whose defining text “Specific Objects” resulted in the return to a rhetoric of power that recentered American masculinism.