RICARDO ROMO’S TEJANO REPORT 10.15.26

Vincent Valdez, a Mexican-American visual artist living and working in San Antonio, recently received the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in the 2-D Visual Art category. The John D. and Catherine C. MacArthur Foundation recognized Valdez along with nineteen others as recipients of the annual “genius grants” across the arts, sciences, and humanities. The award provides $800,000 over five years with no restrictions on how recipients use the funding.

The MacArthur Foundation’s official recognition of Vincent Valdez as a MacArthur Fellow includes a video presentation. In the video, Valdez discusses the underlying concerns of his work—especially his attention to histories and present-day realities affecting Latino communities in the United States. Valdez describes himself as a visual artist commenting, “I look back at history and I use it as a means to not reflect on what has come before us, where we’ve been, what we’ve done, but I use it as a means to connect with the present to make sense of today.”

In the MacArthur Foundation video, Valdez addressed his realistic style and purpose, noting: “Realism for me is simply the way that I see– it’s the way that I view the world; it’s the way that I speak to the world around me. I use realism in a high-definition sense, as a means to make you look extremely closely so you cannot forget.” Valdez has meticulously rendered figurative painting, portraiture, and historical experiences associated with Chicano, Mexican, and U.S. artistic traditions.

Art historians and art lovers recognize that Valdez’s paintings do not simply recover neglected histories. Rather, as the MacArthur Foundation notes, in his Forbidden Fruit and Chavez Ravine paintings, Valdez’s artwork investigates the persistence of injustice, violence, and resistance in the present.

The Strangest Fruit series of paintings, one of which can be seen at the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio, confronts the history and continuing visual legacy of lynching through chilling images of young Latinos suspended against a vacant urban landscape. The Strangest Fruit paintings show young Latino males dressed in regular street clothes, some handcuffed, in a position suggesting they died as a result of being hanged by the neck or lynched, as were many Latinos and Blacks during the active period of the KKK in the early 20th century in Texas and throughout the South. The title of the series reflects the title of a 1939 song, “Strange Fruit” sung by the famous Black American Blues singer, Billie Holiday, describing the horrible lynching of Blacks in the U.S.

The MacArthur Award publicity describes Valdez as a visual artist who brilliantly depicts historical and contemporary scenes reflecting Latino experiences and the contemporary United States. El Chavez Ravine, a project Valdez developed with musician Ry Cooder, featured a 1950s ice-cream truck painted with images evoking the forced displacement of Mexican American residents from East Los Angeles’s Chávez Ravine in advance of Dodger Stadium’s construction.

Valdez was born in San Antonio and attended Burbank High School in the city’s Southside. He received a full scholarship to the Rhode Island School of Design where he earned a B.F.A. in 2000. Harriett and I met Valdez the following summer when he had just completed the painting, Kill the Pachuco Bastards [2001]. We admired his talent and commissioned him to paint a Virgin of Guadalupe on plywood for an upcoming exhibit celebrating the beloved “Brown Madonna.” We were pleasantly surprised when Valdez arrived at our home with a very large eight-by-four-foot 2-D dimensional wood painting of the Virgin. After enjoying the painting for 15 years in our home, we donated it to the McNay Art Museum, where it is on permanent display.

In a video posted on the MacArthur Foundation website, Valdez explains, “The majority of the works that I’ve created, the foundations are rooted in a personal lived experience in some way or another. This is a way of not only documenting my own personal lifetime, but perhaps one day the work offers a glimpse at a time and a place in the world.” In 2004, the McNay Museum in San Antonio exhibited Stations, Valdez’s suite of monumental charcoal drawings of boxers in positions of stations of the cross commemorating the crucifixion of Christ. At age 26, Valdez was the youngest artist to have had a solo exhibition at a major museum in San Antonio.

Valdez focuses on subjects that record his observations and experiences of life in the twenty-first century. He has created powerful images of American identity that confront injustice and inequity while imbuing his subjects with empathy and humanity. Richly detailed portraits of Latinos explore Latino history and identity, including difficult chapters of American history such as violence and discrimination against Latinos and the displacement of communities. Valdez states, “I aim to incite public remembrance and to impede distorted realities that I witness, like the social amnesia that surrounds us all.” In 2017, The New York Times recognized Valdez for his powerful painting, “The City I,” depicting a Ku Klux Klan gathering on the outskirts of an unknown metro area that suggests that Klan members could be our neighbors, co-workers, or ordinary people in our community.

I first wrote about Vincent Valdez in 2018 when he was invited to exhibit in The Face of Battle: Americans at War 9/11 to Now, at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. That year Harriett and I visited the Portrait Gallery with several curators and learned of their efforts to include works of art that explored “the human costs of ongoing wars through portraiture.”

Valdez’s powerful black-and-white painting of a horse-drawn carriage carrying a U.S. flag-draped coffin hung outside the hallway leading to Valdez’s section of the exhibit. The carriage seems to be moving slowly in a fog as an honor guard walks alongside. Valdez devoted six works to The Face of Battle exhibit, four of which used funeral procession imagery.

The curators at the National Portrait Gallery allowed Valdez to have a gallery room where one’s eyes immediately focused on an oil portrait titled “John.” This portrait, along with paintings of two different funeral processions and a video, represented a tribute to Valdez’s close friend whose service in the Iraq-Afghanistan war cost him his life. Valdez responded by producing a video showing a slow-moving coffin mysteriously suspended without wheels six feet off the ground, traveling through the neighborhoods of South San Antonio where many young Latino war victims had lived.

In 2022 I wrote about Valdez’s painting, The Beginning Is Near, An American Trilogy: The City I (2015–2016). The painting is a 30-foot-long four-canvas work depicting contemporary Ku Klux Klan figures which was shown at the Musée du quai Branly–Jacques Chirac in Paris. Harriett and I had gone to the Paris Museum to see the exhibition Black Indians from New Orleans (Black Indians de La Nouvelle-Orléans). Valdez’s large painting, The City, dominated the section addressing the U.S. civil-rights movement and the continuing legacy of white supremacy. The City painting at the Chirac in Paris and Valdez’s other paintings in the beautiful exhibit catalog established Valdez as one of the few Chicano artists recognized internationally.

Valdez also received the Ford and Mellon Foundations Latinx Artist Fellowship (2022) and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant for Painters and Sculptors (2016). The New Americans series funded by the ACLU depicts images of people, communities, and scenes from across the country, creating what the artist describes as “a portrait of resistance.”

Vincent Valdez has returned to San Antonio to give back to his community. His current formal college affiliation is with the Alamo Colleges District in San Antonio. He was named the district’s inaugural Artist-in-Residence for 2025–26. La Línea/The Line: Works by Vincent Valdez opens with a public reception on Wednesday, October 7, 2026 at the Alamo Colleges District ACCESS Common Ground Gallery, 2222 N. Alamo St., San Antonio. Doors open at 5:30 p.m., with formal remarks scheduled for 6:00 p.m. The exhibition remains on view through February 26, 2027.

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Copyright 2026 by Ricardo Romo. All photo and art credits as indicated above.