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Vincent Valdez at MASS MoCA

Contemporary Social Realism

By: - Jul 06, 2025

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Vincent Valdez Just a Dream
Co-curated by Denise Markonish
With the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston
MASS MoCA
North Adams, Mass.

Through April, 2026

Vincent Valdez was born into a Mexican American family, in 1997, in San Antonio, Texas. Starting at three he demonstrated a proficiency in drawing. By nine he was apprenticed to mural painter Alex Rubio. He worked on a series of murals; the first was located at the former site of the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center in San Antonio. Later, Rubio and Valdez worked side-by-side to complete murals under the auspices of the Community Cultural Arts program.

He earned a full scholarship to Rhode Island School of Design graduating with a B.F.A. in 2000. For his senior project he created “Kill the Pachuco Bastard!” The strident, illustrative, violent work documented 1943 race riots when members of the military and off duty police attacked Mexican Americans wearing what were known as Zoot Suits. That incident, as well as lynchings, were not part of the history he learned attending school in the city in which these atrocities occurred. 

As an emerging artist he was committed to making visible this terrible history in his work. This is precisely what is being expunged and defunded by the white supremacist regime and policies of President Donald J. Trump. Purging equity, diversity and inclusion from the curriculum students will be taught a sanitized, white supremacist version of American history. 

His professors at RISD warned Valdez that pursuing this agit-prop work would stifle hopes for a viable professional career. Considering the young art student pursuing his heritage in that renowned art school presents a fascinating conundrum. It resulted in a conflation of indigenous heritage with the highest level of technical and aesthetic training. His work is infused with mastery of the full spectrum of art history and professional execution. Against the odds he has pursued his own vision and agenda in the work. There were later influences, like the politically charged work of Philip Guston which he was not exposed to at RISD. The cutting edge art school is very main stream and, at that time, Guston’s late work had been written off by the art world. 

While he was a visiting professor at Boston University he approached the Museum of Fine Arts with the offer to choose a work from his studio. Curator Kenworth Moffett responded that he would be interested in one of his older abstract expressionist works. Guston was then creating neo expressionist works including images of Klansmen riding around in cars. Years later the MFA acquired a large, late painting. 

As we enter the first large gallery of the Valdez exhibition at MoCA the shadow of Guston is palpable though filtered and subliminal. “Beginning is Near (An American Trilogy) Chapter One; The City” (2016) is some 30’ wide. We are confronted, eyeball-to- eyeball, by 14 hooded members of the Ku Klux Klan. The black and white night scene is illuminated by the raking headlights of a pickup truck on the far edge of the image. In the tightly cropped composition the hooded figures are clustered in a line directly facing and confronting us. The image is static and timeless. They aren’t doing anything beyond demonstrating their right to assembly. What we feel is entirely up to us. How the image is perceived in North Adams is arguably different than how it would be contemplated in Mississippi or Alabama.

The impact is contemporized by subtle details. One man sips from an American Centennial can of Budweiser. Another is looking at his cell phone. A hooded child points to us in the gesture of “I Want You” from a vintage Army recruiting poster. That poster appears on a wall of the “Pachuco” painting. The child wears Nike sneakers. There is the daunting message that his parents are raising him to hate non whites.

In a video interview Valdez stated that it took a year to complete the work. In opting for monumental scale with ironic restraint it testifies that he listened to his RISD professors. He evolved from the illustrative protest style of the earlier “Pachuco” to work that evokes the neo classicism of the master of the French Revolution, Jacques Louis David, and his massive, unfinished work on paper “Oath of the Tennis Court.” 

Gazing on these hooded signifiers of hate we come to realize that they are American citizens, like you and me, with costumes. They are the “good people” that Trump praised at Charlottesville and pardoned as participants in the January 6 riots. 

In the video interview we learned that Valdez had a direct, inadvertent interaction with the Klan. Emerging from a San Antonio building he found himself in the middle of a Klan demonstration in front of the Alamo. “I was approached by the Grand Wizard in a red robe. He looked at me and said ‘You don’t belong here’ ” Valdez recalled. But the subsequent painting is not a response to that scary incident. 

The early “Pachuco” painting literally ended up under the artist’s bed. By word of mouth he was visited by comedian and philanthropist Cheech Marin. He immediately acquired it and the piece was exhibited as part of Cheech’s Chicano Visions: American Painters on the Verge, which traveled to twelve venues from 2001 to 2007, including San Antonio Museum of Art (SAMA), the National Hispanic Cultural Center in Albuquerque, the Indiana State Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art, La Jolla, and the De Young Museum in San Francisco. The painting was showcased in “Cheech Collects,” the inaugural permanent collection exhibition of The Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art, Culture & Industry in Riverside, California.

Detail from 30' wide The Beginning is Near Part One, 2015-2016.

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As we turn to the right in the large gallery with the “Klan” painting we encounter “The Strangest Fruits” (2013). There are nine, life-sized depictions of contorted men hanging from invisible nooses. Again, Valdez forefronts the little known incidents of the lynching of Hispanics. 

The title of the series was inspired by Billie Holiday’s famous 1939 song “Strange Fruit” which was adapted from Abel Meeropol’s anti-lynching poem written in 1936. Again the artist has us view these victims/ martyrs as more universal than specific. By deleting the rope they become more universal than specific. Our mind and imagination must complete the tragic events. We do not view the mob of onlookers as is the usual case when vintage images are used by artists. By deleting them the witnesses become all of us. There are no innocent bystanders in a society which ignores or condones public executions. 

The “poses” of the men evoke a series of life-size drawings by Robert Longo. On the roof of his studio assistants threw tennis balls at the models while he photographed. He caught their spontaneous wincing gestures. The images were evocative but conveyed no deeper meaning as is the case with Valdez. 

In the center of the gallery is “It Was a Very Good Year (1987/1988)” 2024, a monumental 40-foot diptych. Valdez juxtaposes Michael Jordan’s famous 1988 free-throw line dunk with Lt. Colonel Oliver North’s raised hand during the Iran-Contra hearings. Both sides of the free standing wall have meticulous color renderings. As Jordan hangs in mid-air there is a curving line of advertising logos that line the arena. 

On the desk in front of North, in the act of swearing an oath, are rendered stacks of file folders. To the right is a small framed photo of President Ronald Reagan. Again we are drawn into the work by its obsessive, palpable realism. We are left alone as to what the two iconic images mean.

On the other flanking wall is a grid of stills comprising “Beginning Is Near (An American Trilogy) Chapter Two Dream Baby Dream (2017-2018).” The black and white images depict individuals speaking at the podium during the funeral of Muhammud Ali. They represented the spectrum of Americans. 

The panoramic painting “Eaten” (2018-2019) is an excursion into horrific surrealism evoking Orwell’s “Animal Farm” by way of Ovid’s “Metamorphoses.” An ominous pig is sprawled over the grim body parts of someone it has devoured. There are remnants like a shoe, broken watch, glasses and crumpled money. Below are painted fragments in bronze. The ugly face of the pig has the eyes of former FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover; the slick hair is from Robert S. McNamara, the Secretary of Defense who oversaw the Vietnam War. Its jowls are based on Steve Bannon, who was an advisor to President Donald S. Trump during his first term. Valdez has gone to the dark side in depicting this nightmare.

A portrait “So Long Mary Ann” (2019) signifies his mastery as a painter. The subject, a shirtless Hispanic has tattooed the name of his mother several times. The painting is dark and difficult to make out. We marvel at the rendering of reflected light on his bald head. The title is taken from a song by Leonard Cohen.

There is a series of framed drawings “Since 1977” that represents all of the presidents from his birth until 2019. Against a black background the black and white renderings appear to be sinking. Each subsequent president is less visible. Obama appears to be struggling to keep his head above the horizon line. By the final image of Trump all that is visible is his iconic hair. Just what does the artist imply about these sinking presidents?

The tall, narrow diptych, “Expulsion from the Great City” (2002) represents a contemporary Adam and Eve. In darkly rendered, black and white pastel, they upgrade the Fall of Mankind. In confining spaces they are frontally nude. He seems contorted while she is still and static.

Work in the adjoining galleries is more eclectic and feels like a sidebar to the impact of the main gallery.

It’s there that we encountered a vintage ice cream truck “El Chavez Ravine” (2009). Converted trickster cars, Lowriders, are a significant aspect of Hispanic culture. The paintings elucidate the story of Los Angeles’s historically Mexican community, Chavez Ravine. Deemed the “worst slum in the city,” the land was seized from homeowners using eminent domain and funds from the Housing Act of 1949. Though the neighborhood was demolished to make way for the Elysian Park Heights public housing project, the new high rise housing complex was never constructed, due to the Red Scare, which led to opposition to public housing. Instead the land was sold to Brooklyn Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley for the construction of Dodger Stadium. Valdez’s painting illustrates the inhumane treatment of Chavez Ravine residents and also showcases their resistance against the seizure of their land.

“People of the Sun / El Gente de la Sol (the Santanas),” depicts the artist’s grandparents in front of a sheet hanging from a clothesline. It conveys an elderly Hispanic couple. The meticulous, loving image took three years to complete. Valdez told the New York Times: “It’s one of the very, very few paintings that I am content with,” He added: “It speaks about the labor and the toil and the determination of creating that better life and situation in America, so that your offspring have a better way forward.” 

There are odd encounters- a “Dutch” storm at sea- and a reclining female nude seen with a city in the background. There is a corner with several drawings of boxers. Finally one encounters a room of studies, Polaroid’s and archival works. 

The entropy of the exhibition winds down from the potent, punch to the gut, in your face impact of the “Klan” gallery. At 48 the curators appear determined that we see all aspects of work of the past 25 years including juvenalia and the marginal. I hobbled out in a state of submissive exhaustion. The overriding impression, short of the ephemera, was coming to know one of the great artists of our time. Now at mid career the best is yet to come.

Kudos to MASS MoCA for giving us just the kind of show that Trump is determined to stamp out. Kudos to MASS MoCA for giving us just the kind of show that Trump is determined to stamp out. Significantly, the administration has yanked back a $50,000 NEA grant approved before Trump took office and a $101,000 grant from IMLS.. The arts which are under assault are an important part of what makes America great.