More often than not, an artist’s prowess at mark-making supersedes the need for content or context.
This practice makes for technically complex works that exude an understanding of history akin to amnesia. Artists, just like any neonate, are often born without teeth. With any luck, as their skill set grows as fast as their canines, so does their understanding of the world around them, as well as their ability to successfully parse their reality.
Vincent Valdez splits his time between his native San Antonio and adopted city of Houston. His work shares characteristics with the top tier of Gen X Chicano artists, straddling hyperrealism and conceptualism while exploring themes of social justice. The result is provocative, nimbly shifting from the personal to the political with relative ease.
Valdez’s skills have earned him a Ford and Mellon Foundations Latinx Artist Fellowship, a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant for Painters and Sculptors and, most recently, a 2026 fellowship from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, which recognizes individuals who have made an extraordinary impact in their respective fields.
MacArthur awards are commonly referred to as “genius grants,” with up to 20 annual fellows receiving $800,000 in unrestricted funds paid out over five years. The grants offer recipients the freedom to explore their practice without the pressure of financial stress.
Some artists are quick to respond to the accolades of others with sanctimonious, thinly concealed jealousy. But the bottom line is, without an unyielding drive to push himself and his work ever further, Valdez would not be situated where he finds himself today. He has said that his aim is to “incite public remembrance,” and to loosely quote Gore Vidal, combat the “social amnesia that surrounds us.”
Valdez’s stylistic evolution from muralist to figurative painter, and figurative painter to conceptual artist was gradual. Take his 2006 series “Stations,” for instance. In some of the images, the facial features of both the hero and the audience are distorted and stylized much like paintings of the Zoot Suit Riots of 1943 — a common subject of Chicano paintings that engage with subject matter that vilifies black and brown men in an era of racial hysteria.
Others of Valdez’s works edge toward photorealism. All take on the gritty urban feel of the Ashcan School a là George Bellows, as if he was illustrating a Hemingway short story for The Atlantic. The title, however, implies that our pugilist hero is a surrogate — a stand-in for Christ as depicted in The Stations of the Cross, imparting this struggle with a significance loftier than the dirt-, blood- and sweat-stained floors of an illicit boxing arena.
Jump ahead to 2014 and the series The Strangest Fruit, exhibited at Artpace San Antonio. Its inspiration is the anti-lynching poem originally penned by schoolteacher Abel Meeropol and popularized in the song “Strange Fruit,” recorded by Billie Holiday.
Valdez co-opted the civil rights-era anthem to deal specifically with the lynching of brown men in the Jim Crow South, a subject often ignored by history. Using friends as subjects, the artist depicted them with all matter of context removed — ropes, trees, jeering crowds of onlookers — leaving the contorted body of each man floating against a white background.
Again, we encounter the idea of historical amnesia and erasure — of forgotten or whitewashed aspects of American history. In Los Angeles artist Ken Gonzales-Day’s photographic Erased Lynching Series (2002-2005), the artist erased horrifically contorted bodies and ligatures, leaving only trees or gallows and the warped expressions of onlookers.
Despite the visual reversal of their approaches, the artists are addressing the same underlying social context that allowed such atrocities to occur in the first place — a state in which the noose itself becomes a metaphor that continues to sublimate history.
Valdez’s The City I (2015–16) is a four-part canvas mural that depicts a group of people in Ku Klux Klan garb overlooking a city at night. This massive, cinematically scaled work gives the viewer the nauseating feeling of turning the wrong corner and stumbling onto this scene firsthand.
Just as the young men in The Strangest Fruit are dressed in contemporary clothing, visual cues including cell phones and a late-model truck place this imagined encounter firmly in the present. The City I took the artist nearly a year to complete. While there are exceptions, it is this level of skill and dedication that catches the eye of a fellowship. Anything short of this amount of effort is just window dressing.
Valdez is also the inaugural artist-in-residence at Alamo Colleges District (ACD) in San Antonio, where his latest exhibition, La Línea/The Line: Works by Vincent Valdez, opened on Wednesday, Oct. 7 at Common Ground Gallery.
The exhibition includes paintings, drawings and sculpture created over the past two decades — works that earned Valdez his accolades.
Free, 8 a.m.-5 p.m., ACD (ACCESS) Common Ground Gallery, 2222 North Alamo, (210) 485-0000, alamo.edu.
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