In an episode of the PBS documentary sequence American Masters, the musician Ry Cooder described the painter Vincent Valdez as “the Albrecht Dürer of Chicano artists”. This sobriquet is suitable, given the virtuosic element of his photos, however the pathos and cinematic depth that defines Valdez’s work feels fiercer than that comparability implies. Born in San Antonio, Texas, Valdez has solid a profession as a storyteller and fearless translator of marginalised American experiences, utilizing allegory and confrontational figuration to handle the failures and triumphs of latest US society.
Vincent Valdez: Only a Dream… is the artist’s first main museum survey, co-organised by the Up to date Arts Museum Houston (CAMH, till 23 March) and the Massachusetts Museum of Up to date Artwork (Mass Moca, 24 Could 2025-5 April 2026). Spanning portray, video, drawing and sculpture, Only a Dream… chronicles 20 years of Valdez’s artistic manufacturing, together with never-before seen work and early-career gems from his childhood and his undergraduate days at Rhode Island Faculty of Design.
Vincent Valdez, So Lengthy, MaryAnn, 2019 Photograph: Paul Salveson. Courtesy Vincent Valdez
Valdez’s compositions are unflinching of their material and arresting of their directness—whether or not he’s depicting the brutalisation of Chicano our bodies through the 1943 Zoot Swimsuit Riots in Los Angeles or the chilling ubiquity of the fashionable Ku Klux Klan, the artist makes use of frank, atmospheric realism to immerse the viewer within the psychic house of his topics. Nowhere in his oeuvre is that this extra evident than in his The Strangest Fruit sequence from 2013, a collection of 9 work depicting Mexican and Mexican American males suspended from invisible nooses. Named after the anti-lynching music popularised by jazz singer Billie Vacation, the sequence exposes the under-reported influence of state-sponsored extralegal executions within the Mexican American group, bringing that violence to mild in a stark and haunting visible language.
Because the US tilts additional and additional towards a xenophobic and authoritarian nationalism—with the nation’s cultural funding hanging within the stability—forthright, genuine voices like Valdez’s are extra essential than ever earlier than. The Artwork Newspaper caught up with Valdez to speak politics, patriotism and portray.
The Artwork Newspaper: By way of your storytelling selections, when does an concept stop to be a portray and must be a sculpture or a multimedia set up?
Vincent Valdez: Over the course of two-plus many years within the exhibition, and over the course of a lifetime, actually, it has been a protracted discovered means of being true to my artistic instincts. Concepts seem in my thoughts usually throughout my sleep or after I’m standing within the bathe for no matter motive. I permit the idea to dictate the type of execution it’ll require. So, for instance, a sequence just like the Strangest Fruit work, which had been a sequence of 9 or ten canvases, I attempted to maintain true to the way in which that I first initially envisioned them in my very own creativeness. Not too long ago, with a sequence of sculptures that I began to delve into, the subject material itself, in some cases, requires for it to be current in a three-dimensional format.
Vincent Valdez, The Strangest Fruit (3), 2013 Photograph: Mark Menjivar. Courtesy Vincent Valdez
Given the way in which the present US political regime is concentrating on the Mexican American group, how do you’re feeling concerning the course of your work? How do you wish to talk these emotions?
Even in a second like this, folks nonetheless aren’t asking most of these questions, particularly contained in the artwork world. The work for me personally solely stands as extra of a conviction over the course of my lifetime—the concept of my very own glimpse at our collective American social amnesia, now extra so than ever. It is at all times been my quest to attempt to allow folks to additional study what is correct in entrance of our very noses, however in some ways, Individuals select to stay painfully trapped in their very own mythology—denial. A second like this solely defines Twenty first-century America even additional; that for many communities of color, that is nothing new. This actuality has at all times been part of our existence and realities confronted in up to date American society.
America offers me no scarcity of material, you understand. However I do not actually set out within the studio to attempt to slap folks within the face or hit them over the top with a sledgehammer. I’ve at all times felt that it’s my accountability, each as an artist and as a citizen, to take a stance. The nice historian Howard Zinn mentioned: “You can not stay impartial on a transferring prepare.” And I do not minimalise my material in any method. For me, a transparent glimpse of society as I see it’s my very own method of preserving true to my very own imaginative and prescient.
Within the context of placing collectively a profession survey, does trying again in your total profession influence the method of creating new work in any respect?
After I see how a lot work includes the exhibition, Only a Dream…, over 150 works, I get a way that, OK, possibly I am able to retire (laughs). Within the exhibition, a very particular portion of the exhibit, a small hidden gem for the viewers in there’s a set of flat information that they introduced from my studio saved in San Antonio. On this exhibition, we encourage viewers to work together with the work, which is a uncommon factor. They open the flat information they usually can hint a chronological timeline of my inventive path ranging from age three in a few of my earliest drawings all the way in which to the current.
Vincent Valdez, Recuerdo, 1999 Courtesy Joe A. Diaz
One of many issues that an exhibition like this has actually offered me with is a real alternative to view my work solely as a spectator, a viewer, an viewers member, versus the creator. There’s only a few items that I do not flinch at after encountering them out on the planet, always choosing them aside. This is among the very first occasions in my life that I can simply recognize and benefit from the work and this imaginative and prescient that is been unfolding like an ongoing novel over the course of a lifetime. It is given me an opportunity to mirror on what I am not as considering any additional, proper? I see the gaps of unexplored territory—extra etchings or extra sculpture, possibly some extra video work. So far as material, I actually attempt to not dictate that. I actually let the world exterior the studio doorways type of take up that, and whichever course it’ll lead me, I am prepared to comply with.
Who do you take into account your artwork historic predecessors?
You understand, in all honesty, my earliest influences again within the day proceed right now. I have never a lot been artwork traditionally centered. My references are filmmakers. I have been very moved over my lifetime by the dimensions of the film display screen. It formed a lot of my very own notion about Americanism, my American id and my position and place on this ongoing narrative. However primarily, I began at age 9 years outdated as a muralist. I beloved the dimensions of monumental murals, and I used to be trying on the Chicano muralists, who I used to be so proud to be a torchbearer for, of their historic legacy of mural-making in America. It actually gave me that grand scope of imaginative and prescient by way of a social context.
Set up view of Vincent Valdez, Eaten, 2018-19. Assortment David Hoberman, promised present to the Hammer Museum Photograph: Paul Salveson
What do you assume a mural or a mural-size portray accomplishes {that a} movie does not?
Plain presence, proper? A mural completely resides, is born and lives in a group and in some ways, I take into account a movie show the identical method. You have got an viewers, it builds like that momentary group, proper? This concentrate on constructing a relationship between picture and viewer, that to me was such a robust power in life. It was an unstated, invisible, however current communication, a dialogue, a dialog between the viewer and an image. I bear in mind seeing the flexibility of a group that claimed these murals as their very own, protected them and enshrined them as sacred mementos of their very own histories and their very own ongoing struggles. And I assumed, for me, that was it. That is what I wanted to spend the remainder of my life making an attempt to determine do for folks.
Vincent Valdez: Only a Dream…, till 23 March, Up to date Arts Museum HoustonVincent Valdez: Only a Dream…, 24 Could 2025-5 April 2026, Massachusetts Museum of Up to date Artwork, North Adams, Massachusetts
