In 2015, artist Vincent Valdez released his imposingly large painting The City I. The controversy that swiftly ignited upon its release had long been brewing even as Valdez was painting it. The 30ft black and white work shows over a dozen hooded Klansmen gathering rather portentously in the middle of the night. The painting, which many initially critiqued for unnecessarily referencing a long-past chapter in American race relations, quickly showed its relevancy – as it was arriving into the world, Klansman David Duke himself gave then candidate Donald Trump a presidential endorsement, and the four years of the first Trump presidency would embolden exactly the racial animus that Valdez had portrayed.
Now, the first major museum survey of Valdez’s prodigious output is released on the eve of a second Trump presidency, when signs of the racism this second term is likely to unleash are already evident in the form of revolting text messages being sent to Black Americans. The City I is joined by works attesting to the sweep of Valdez’s artistic vision, showing it as not an isolated example of artistic prophecy but rather as a part of the uncannily accurate, unerring vision that Valdez has demonstrated as a painter.
Including more than 120 works from across well over two decades of Valdez’s career, Just a Dream … is set to dominate the galleries of Contemporary Arts Museum Houston for the next five months. The show includes many of Valdez’s signature pieces, works that are overwhelming both in their size and in the emotional intensity of their subject matter, which does not shy away from topics such as lynchings and riots – albeit, not gratuitously but rather in the service of historical memory against the cultural amnesia of the social media age.
During an interview that occurred shortly before the election, Valdez shared the sense of strangeness and surprise at how his career has somehow rhymed with history once again. “There’s bigger powers at play in the universe than me,” he told me, “and it’s feeling more and more absurd as we get closer to the election. To think the timeline of my life and career has lined up to magically be – of all moments in time – at this one.”
At a time when troll farms and conservative podcasters are rampantly sharing misinformation that fueled Trump’s re-election to the nation’s highest office, Valdez’s art stands out for having a claim to truth that is altogether different from the rumors spread in the social media sphere. His 2013 series The Strangest Fruit depicts the bodies of Latino men who have been lynched, minus the ropes used to haul them up for murder. The series is impactful for how the bodies seem to levitate almost beautifully, as well as for the strangely peaceful and curious expressions on the men’s faces. The Strangest Fruit is a witness of sorts to the hundreds of executions perpetrated against those immigrating from Mexico over the years, but it also encompasses other forms of inhumanity perpetrated against this group, including a for-profit prison industry and mass deportations.
Valdez has been described as a prodigy, as from a young age he followed his artistic vocation and has created furiously ever since. He recalled first picking up a paintbrush at age 10, when he was taken under the wing of muralist Alex Rubio, then 19 years old. According to Valdez, as he and Rubio painted murals around immigrant neighborhoods in San Antonio, he began to grasp the kind of power that art could have on a community, realizing that this was what he wanted to dedicate his life to. “I begin to see and understand the reality of the world for what it is and how it really functions,” he told me. “As the murals took life, I witnessed communities embrace these images in their own way. They become sacred monuments almost.”
As Valdez’s life as a painter began to take shape, he found himself drawn to the most emotionally wrenching aspects of the Chicano experience. He recalled watching the movie Platoon during its theatrical release, being shocked at the calmness of the movie’s audience in the face of its horrors. “It wasn’t the image on the screen that floored me,” he said, “it was the silence of the audience. I realized that I have to find a way to make images so powerful that you make the audience feel something – you captivate them, almost hypnotize them, so that they feel it to their core.”
A work such as Valdez’s 2001 piece Kill the Pachuco Bastard! is a perfect example of this. Painted while Valdez was a senior at the Rhode Island School of Design, it is one of the exhibition’s signature images, as well as a work that gave birth to Valdez’s palette and was an early example of how he would come to blur the lines between myth and the reality of what it means to be an American. The image shows a frozen instant from Los Angeles’s infamous 1943 zoot suit riots, in which US servicemen rampaged against Mexican American youth wearing zoot suits – supposedly because the garments were considered to be unpatriotic during wartime for their waste of rationed materials.
The painting, which measures a good 4x7ft, is a work of carefully scripted chaos, the imagery at once grotesque and gory, yet choreographed like a ballet and full of rich chartreuse greens, bloody maroons and navy blues. Enormous yet endlessly detailed, it declared the ambition that would guide Valdez’s career. “I remember the controversy it stirred,” Valdez said, “the divisions it caused among my professors. They weren’t afraid to tell me ‘nobody wants to hear these stories, it’s career suicide.’ Yet others said ‘F- them, you’re on to something.’ I remember the electricity, the buzz of energy that I felt sitting in front of that piece as it began to unfold.”
The show is filled out by other examples of the Chicano experience, including a series dedicated to boxing and El Chavez Ravine, in which Valdez painted on to a vintage Good Humor ice-cream truck images of Mexican immigrants being dispossessed of their homes in order to make way for Dodger Stadium. Valdez also offers a new work created just for the show, built in collaboration with his partner, Adriana Corral – a site-specific installation verging on public memorial, the work bears witness to the murder of Joe Campos Torres, a decorated veteran who was killed by police in a part of Houston’s Buffalo Bayou known as the Hole, a frequent site of police brutality. “When we think about police brutality, rarely do we think about the statistics of people murdered in the brown communities,” Valdez said. “America doesn’t quite understand yet the complexities of the existence of Latinos in the American structure. Presenting a work like this in the city of Houston itself becomes a way of finding not only a reconciliation but also to serve as a reminder that this story is still a really urgent, pressing issue.”
Valdez shared that Just a Dream … has been overdue in coming, as he reported that the last exhibition focused on Chicano art at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston was in 1977. He hopes that this show will go some way toward setting the record straight. “I feel personally that the show is already a success in its own right because it’s a representation of the Mexican American and Chicano communities,” he told me. “In the art world this is still something that remains a real void. I carry my family and community with me.”
