Vincent Valdez’s studio in East Los Angeles is packed with large canvases, some still in progress. There’s a painting titled Supreme of the Supreme Court with portions unpainted and sketched on the canvas. On the same canvas, there are glimpses of the Rockefellers and depictions of Manifest Destiny. Another wall has a painting of Michael Jordan mid-dunk circa 1988, shining in the sea of darkness behind him. His canvases of various sizes are stacked and leaning against the walls, at times five works deep.
“What you see here is the most work that I’ve ever had at a single time inside my studio,” Valdez told ARTnews in October ahead of his first major museum survey that opened at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston last month and will travel to MASS MoCA next May.
Valdez has kept the room intentionally warm, hoping to speed up the drying of the oil paints in the Jordan piece. It’s crunch time. With “Just a Dream…” as its title, the exhibition will bring together 25 years’ worth of work; for Valdez, it’s an apt time to reflect on the arc of his artmaking, thinking through how connected his works are. He sees them as chapters in one giant novel, the United States its protagonist. From the Zoot Suit Riots to the Iran-Contra Affair, his work interrogates all the country represents, its brutal histories of racism and the inciting incidents that brought us to where we are today.
“This work, although it is complex in its nature and heavy in its subject matter, has been the very thing that has kept me at peace,” he said. “It is the truest form of freedom that I’ll ever know in this life, being in the studio and talking about the absurdities outside of the studio.”
Vincent Valdez, The Strangest Fruit (3), 2013. Oil on canvas.
Photo Mark Menjivar/Collection David Hoberman
Born in San Antonio in 1977 and now based between LA and Houston, Valdez started working with CAMH and MASS MoCA, the exhibition’s two organizers, nearly five years ago to bring this show to life. When cocurators Patricia Restrepo and Denise Markonish approached him about a survey exhibition in 2019, he felt he wouldn’t have much to say for a retrospective. “But then I started to love the idea about re-collecting 25 years of work to be seen together for the very first time,” he said.
Among Valdez’s most well-known series is “The Strangest Fruit” (2013), which explores the underknown history of the lynching of Mexicans in Texas between 1848 and 1928. In these images, men are suspended in space, set against a stark background. They appear to be floating or flying; in one, you might mistake a man for dancing. “His work braces us against amnesia and against the act of not looking,” said Restrepo, who recalled the power she saw in these works when she first encountered them a decade ago. “He’s reversing our tendency to be both a fearful and forgotten America.”
She added, “He has been putting the United States on trial in his studio over the last 25 years, and this exhibition is going to be the collective exploration of all of those trials.”
The timing of the current survey is no different, opening just two weeks after one of the most crucial presidential elections in US history.
Vincent Valdez and Adriana Corral, The Hole (In Memory), 2024.
Photo Peter Molick/Courtesy Contemporary Arts Museum Houston
At CAMH, “Just a Dream…” will take over the entire museum, the first time the institution has done so for a single-artist exhibition. The heart of this presentation is a new work, commissioned by CAMH, about the murder of Jose “Joe” Campos Torres, a 23-year-old Chicano and Vietnam veteran who died at the hands of the Houston police in 1977—coincidentally, the same year Valdez was born. Officers beat Torres and, instead of taking him to the hospital under the orders of the city jail, drowned him in Houston’s central river, the Buffalo Bayou, at “the hole” where police regularly beat minorities. When the museum asked Valdez to create a new piece for the show, he knew almost immediately that he wanted to focus on this history.
“I have really gravitated toward stories that, in my opinion, are about people, for people,” he said. “I see the human figure as a walking memorial. We all embody our own histories, tales of struggles and triumphs.”
In collaboration with his partner Adriana Corral, an artist also from Texas, Valdez will create a sculpture, tilted The Madonna (2024), for Torres that they hope will eventually become a public memorial. Using gypsum, shells, and soil gathered from Buffalo Bayou, they cast a Virgen de Guadalupe statue using the earth from the site where Torres was beaten and drowned to fabricate the piece. Accompanying The Madonna is a pencil-and-gypsum drawing of Torres, as well as a new series, “Notes for a Future,” of wrinkled flyers in bronze, a new medium for Valdez. The smoothed-out flyers, six of which hang on the Torres memorial wall, re-create actual protest posters, including the Moody Park Riots, which occurred in 1978, in the wake of Torres’s murder.
“It wasn’t enough to just memorialize [Torres],” Valdez said. “Where do we go from here? You have to force yourself to ask, ‘So has it changed? Has anything changed?’ In my opinion, no, absolutely not.”
Vincent Valdez and Adriana Corral, The Madonna, 2024.
Photo Peter Molick/Courtesy Contemporary Arts Museum Houston
Valdez first began drawing people at age 10; he had learned by tracing images directly from the TV, paused via an early VCR. While other kids were making stick figures and scribbles, he focused his attention on the musculature of the protagonists in his favorite comics, like Frank Millers’ The Dark Knight and Don Lomax’s The Vietnam War Journal. “The idea of the hero for me plays such an essential role to this day because it started to provide me this keen sense of awareness as I got older about the role of mythological heroes and how they played out within American contemporary society,” he said.
Around this time, he began assisting artist Alex Rubio on the murals he made around San Antonio. At each of Rubio’s outdoor studios, Valdez witnessed the community pouring in, offering food, watching the process, and asking questions. “I saw the collective power of community and how they were embracing these images that I was making for them, and I vowed never to abandon that as an artist,” he said.
He left Texas to study at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, returning to his home state after his graduation in 2000. He moved to LA in 2005 at the instance of musician Ry Cooder to collaborate on a project that would become “El Chavez Ravine,” a Good Humor ice cream truck painted with a scene showing of the removal of Mexican Americans for the construction of the Dodgers Stadium in the late 1950s.
Installation view of “Vincent Valdez: Just a Dream…,” 2024–25, at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, showing The Beginning is Near, An American Trilogy, Ch. 1: The City.
Photo Peter Molick/Courtesy Contemporary Arts Museum Houston
More recently, Valdez’s art has made headlines for its display. The Blanton Museum of Art in Austin spent two years planning to contextualize Valdez’s The Beginning is Near, An American Trilogy, Ch. 1: The City (2015–16). The four-panel, 30-foot-wide painting features 14 hooded KKK members, including a baby; they look right at you. One holds a beer can, another has taken a break from scrolling on their phone. When it went on view in 2018, the museum brought various members of the community to preview The City and added a sign at the entrance of the exhibition warning that the artwork “may elicit strong emotions.” Undergirding this provocative imagery is a commentary on how racism and white supremacy can hide in plain sight. Nearly a decade after its making, Restrepo said The City holds just as much weight in depicting untold stories today.
“Vincent is a master at imaging stories of both struggle and inequity, as well as resistance and community,” Restrepo said. “He fearlessly holds up a mirror to the contemporary American condition, inviting us to join his inquiry for truth. Vincent has been courageous and consistent in his reckoning with his country as both must and adversary. The City images the persistent effects of a haunting past that has not ended, yet is presented at CAMH in a new context.”
Vincent Valdez, People of the Sun (Grandma and Grandpa Santana), 2018.
Photo Peter Molick/Collection Alexa Pooter Brundage
Back in his LA studio, Valdez keeps an amalgamation of images visible from his worktable that he draws on to make his paintings: historical photos, comic book clippings, small portrait sketches, religious imagery, flyers of his previous exhibitions and protest posters. Sunlight seeps in from a skylight, his only method of tracking time while he’s at work. “I never keep a clock in the studio,” he said. “It truly is a labor of love that the clock doesn’t exist for me.”
He points to an artwork on the back of his studio door, a portrait of his grandparents. “It’s the ultimate reminder of why I got to continue doing this and who I’m doing it for,” he said.
