RICARDO ROMO’S TEJANO REPORT 03.08.25 VINCENT VALDEZ “JUST A DREAM”

Vincent Valdez: Latino Artist Confronts Social Amnesia, Injustices, and Historical Ignorance

A major retrospective of Vincent Valdez’s work titled “Just a Dream…” is currently on display at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston through March 23, 2025. The exhibit showcases over two decades of Valdez’s artistic career.

Houston is a booming metropolis known for its world class medical center with 85 hospitals and widely recognized as the most powerful energy center in the world. With a population of 2.3 million, Houston is the fourth largest US city as well as the third largest Latino community in the nation after New York City and Los Angeles. The Houston Latino population is diverse and represents over a million Spanish-speaking residents led
by Mexicans, Central Americans, and South Americans.

The Houston Latino community grew by 40 percent between the years 2010-2025, and Latinos now represent 45 percent of the city’s population. Mexican Americans are the largest Latino population sector; however, the arrival of Cubans and Venenzuelans over the past two decades has matched the percentage of immigrants from Mexico.

Valdez was born in San Antonio’s Southside in 1977. As a young boy, he admired the artistic talent of his great grandfather and spent much of his time drawing and painting. Flat files located on the lower floor of the “Just a Dream…” exhibit allow visitors to see Valdez’s early childhood drawings and his development as an artist. At nine-years old Valdez took up mural painting under the mentorship of another young San Antonio artist, Alex Rubio. During Valdez’s senior year at Burbank High School, he painted a mural on an outside school wall visible from the Interstate Highway.

Valdez also excelled in portrait art and received a full scholarship to the Rhode Island School of Design where he earned his BFA in 2000. He has been awarded several art residencies, including those at the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture (2005), the Vermont Studio Center
(2011), the Künstlerhaus Bethanien (2014), and the Arion Press King Residency. He moved to Houston in 2017 to join the growing art scene there.

Valdez describes himself as “an American-born artist who happens to be Mexican.” Although Valdez’s work centers on Mexican American experiences, he sees these images as “very American before they are ever Mexican or Chicano only.” Early in his career Valdez rose to fame with portraits of boxers, soldiers, embattled families being evicted from their homes, and his powerful rendering of the Zoot-Suit Riots of 1943.

I found an excellent explanation of Valdez’s overall art mission in a statement by the Houston Art League which recognized him as Texas Artist of the Year in 2023. The art organization noted that Valdez “blends large, representational paintings—the scale of which recall Western traditions of history painting as well as mural painting and cinema—with contemporary subject matter.” Valdez told League members that he aimed “to incite public remembrance and to counter the distorted realities that I witness, like the social amnesia that fogs our collective American memory.”

Valdez’s work has evolved over the past two decades, and the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston brilliantly captures his creative journey. As Harriett and I entered the exhibit guided by Valdez, he stopped to discuss the “Strangest Fruit” series depicting lynchings of Mexicans in the late 19th and early 20th century. Historian Monica M. Martinez’s book, The Injustices Never Leave You, demonstrates how local and state governments
enabled and sometimes participated in this brutality. Her book also reveals the ways the horror of anti-Mexican violence lingered within communities for generations, compounding injustice and inflicting further pain and loss.

In the “Strangest Fruit” paintings in the exhibit Valdez presents eight images of victims of lynching violence in a series of large-scale oils on canvas. Each of the 96×138 inch panels depicts a figure larger than life. The Mexican lynching victims dressed in contemporary street clothing
seem suspended in air on a white background. Valdez completed the paintings when he lived in San Antonio. He told the guests touring the exhibit that he recruited San Antonio friends to model for the paintings. The large images remind us of borderland atrocities that until recently have largely been erased or ignored in US and Texas history.

As Valdez hosted the Board of Directors of the Contemporary Arts Museum on a tour of the exhibit, he acknowledged that he focuses on subjects that explore his observations and life experiences in the twenty-first century. The results, as noted in an earlier exhibit at the Catharine Clark Gallery, “are powerful images of American identity that confront injustice and inequity while imbuing his subjects with empathy and humanity.”

Valdez’s first major oils on canvas reflected historical themes and incidents, such as the painting depicting the 1943 Zoot Suit Riots of Los Angeles. The Zoot-Suit painting portrays the infamous World War II-era attacks by U.S. sailors on Mexican-Americans dressed in the era’s flashy, counter-cultural Zoot Suits. Another series of paintings featuring speakers at the funeral of Muhammad Ali reminds viewers of the tragedy of Ali’s struggle to be recognized as a conscientious objector when he refused to be drafted to fight in the Vietnam War.

Until the recent 2025 Los Angeles fires, Valdez has maintained studios in Houston and Los Angeles. His connection to Los Angeles began more than two decades ago. In his first visit to Self Help Graphics & Art in East Los Angeles in 2002, Valdez produced a serigraph print titled “Suspect: Dark Hair, Dark Eyes, Dark Skin” calling attention to inequities in the criminal justice system. In 2005, Valdez moved to Los Angeles at the invitation of Ry Cooder to collaborate on the music-art project that would become “El Chavez Ravine.” Cooder provided Valdez with a studio in L.A.’s Boyle Heights to work on the Chavez Ravine neighborhood project documenting displacement of long-time Latino residents when the city built a new
sports stadium.

In 1950, residents of the predominantly Mexican American community of Chavez Ravine received letters from the city informing them they would have to sell their homes for a proposed public housing project. Many of the 1,800 homeowners were pressured to sell their properties
for less than fair market value.

Then in 1958, Los Angeles officials made a land deal with the owners of the Brooklyn Dodgers that enabled the owners to plan the construction of a new Los Angeles Dodgers’ stadium. Although many homeowners resisted selling, the last remaining families were evicted in 1959. The area was cleared and homes were demolished. Valdez captured the Chavez Ravine story in paintings on an ice cream truck in 2007. The truck was first shown at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art [LACMA]. The Chavez Ravine truck, noted the LACMA curators, “symbolizes the continued struggles for affordable housing and against eminent domain, gentrification, and discrimination going on across the United States.”

During his stay in Los Angeles, Valdez returned to Self Help Graphics in 2010 and created a serigraph titled “John” which memorializes his childhood best friend. Valdez and his friend John Robert Holt, Jr. grew up in the Southside of San Antonio in an area near two of the city’s
historic missions. A video created by Valdez shows a slow-moving coffin covered with the American flag and mysteriously suspended above the ground traveling through the neighborhoods of South San Antonio.

Harriett and I visited Vincent Valdez in 2017 at his studio in Houston as he completed one of the “John” series oil paintings for the National Portrait Gallery exhibit in Washington, D.C. The New York Times had recently recognized Valdez for the completion of a powerful painting depicting a Ku Klux Klan gathering in the outskirts of an unknown city. The KKK series titled “The City 1” shows ordinary figures in KKK hoods in ordinary activities suggesting these Klan members might be anyone in your neighborhood or community.

“The City 1” painting is a powerful 30-foot-wide four-panel canvas rendered in black and white that focuses on racism and white supremacy in America. The painting, currently featured on a large wall of the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, belongs to the UT Austin Blanton Museum. The Blanton, aware of the painting’s social controversies, waited a year after acquiring it to show the painting. When “The City 1” was
first exhibited at UT Austin, Blanton director Simone Wicha told Artnet that the painting was “an exploration of racism, one of the most persistent and challenging social issues of our day.”

The Contemporary Museum curators explained that the Valdez retrospective “celebrates everyday people as empowered, formidable, and resilient, while challenging traditional and historic symbols of power within contemporary society.”

______________________________________________________________

Copyright 2025 by Ricardo Romo, All photo credits as indicated.