Vincent Valdez: Just a Dream…
Vincent Valdez: Just a Dream… is the artist’s first major museum survey and spans over two decades of his work, from early career drawings to current allegorical portraits. This exhibition cements Valdez as one of the most important American painters working today—imaging his country and its people, politics, pride, and foibles.
Working across painting, video, drawing, sculpture, lithography, and multimedia installation, Valdez deftly addresses the failings and triumphs of contemporary American society with a reverential focus on collective memory and overlooked political histories. Valdez states, “I create images as instruments to probe the past in order to reveal an immediacy to what is occurring today. I am alarmed by the denial of history. I will continue to create counter-images to impede the social amnesia that enables our fateful desire to repeat historic patterns.”
Including previously unexhibited and new bodies of work, Just a Dream… is a unique opportunity to see the breadth of Valdez’s practice. The artist often works in series, with this exhibition marking the first time these chapters are in dialogue. Valdez celebrates common people, like his own family members, as empowered, formidable, and present, while challenging traditional and historic symbols of power within contemporary society.
Vincent Valdez: In Memory
Artwork by Vincent Valdez
Texts by Denise Markonish and Rufus Wainwright
Conversation with Roberto Tejada
$60
Vincent 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. Vincent Valdez: In Memory is the first book-length study of his work, which focuses on subjects that explore his observations and experience of life in the twenty-first century. The results are powerful images of American identity that confront injustice and inequity while imbuing his subjects with empathy and humanity. Valdez states, “My aim is to incite public remembrance and to impede distorted realities that I witness, like the social amnesia that surrounds us all.” Recognized for his monumental portrayal of the contemporary figure, his drawn and painted subjects remark on a universal struggle within various socio-political arenas and eras.