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.”
Artist Vincent Valdez joins critic and art historian Max Tolleson for a conversation.
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. He 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.” Exhibitions and Collections include: The Ford Foundation, The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, MASS MoCA, The Museum of Fine Arts Houston, among others. He lives and works in Houston and Los Angeles.
Max Tolleson is a Critic-in-residence at the CORE Program in Houston, Texas and has published scholarship and art criticism with Artnet News, ASAP/J, Glasstire, and Panorama. While living in Marfa, Texas, he researched and wrote about the history of the Chinati Foundation in relation to minimalism, environmental theater, critical regionalism, and the politics of display; he has presented his research at the Getty Foundation and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Max received a PhD in art history from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2023 and was a 2022-2023 Helena Rubinstein Critical Studies Fellow at the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York City.
This event is co-sponsored by The Brooklyn Rail, Terra Foundation for American Art, and the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston
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.