Vincent Valdez: Confronting America’s Uncomfortable Truths

Vincent Valdez, the 48-year-old Chicano artist whose canvases read like visual testimony from America's shadow zones, is stepping up at precisely the moment when artists across the nation are ducking for cover. As culture wars rage and dark powers threaten artistic freedom, Valdez offers monumental paintings that refuse to let America forget its most uncomfortable truths.

His first major museum survey, Vincent Valdez: Just a Dream…, opened May 24 at MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts, co-organized with Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, where the show debuted last November. The mid-career retrospective exhibition spans 25 years of work that demands an unflinching cultural reckoning.

"I am an observer. I bear witness. I am committed to putting it down on record. To testify. I choose to confront the world as opposed to turning away from it," Valdez says. His is a manifesto that lands with fearless audacity in 2025, a time when museums report feeling under siege and federal arts agencies face unprecedented budget slashing.

“I think that for many of us, this is the very moment that we have all been preparing for,” Valdez said in an interview with Whitehot Magazine. “I don't fool myself into thinking that a painting is going to topple governments or change economies, but I do believe in the true nature and the power of art in regards to not only reflecting one's society, but in trying to communicate with others, helping others to see the world in a slightly different way. For me, that in itself becomes a miniature act of revolution,” he said.

Born in 1977 on San Antonio's South Side, Valdez began his artistic journey at age 10, learning to paint murals under the mentorship of muralist Alex Rubio. A childhood fascination with superheroes and their necessary anti-heroes evolved into a sustained interrogation of American power structures that makes Valdez’s work important and necessary today.

Visitors to Mass MoCA stand before works from the Vincent Valdez series The Strangest Fruit, which translates Billie Holiday's haunting protest song into visual form. Photo by Lisa Freeman

At Mass MoCA, the work that perhaps best captures Valdez's confrontational approach is The Strangest Fruit (2013), a seriesthat renders in visual form the haunting protest song made famous by Billie Holiday. The eight pieces that comprise The Strangest Fruit depict young Latino men in contemporary dress posed against a stark white background with their hands positioned as if hanged from trees. The poses are deliberate and chilling: they suggest both surrender and death rendered with photorealistic precision.

The white voids that surround the men suggest the cancellation of their histories by a white dominated society. By placing the subjects in this liminal space between presence and absence, memory and amnesia, Valdez forces viewers to confront the ongoing legacy of anti-Latino violence in America. 

“I fear that people still today in the 21st century deny the fact that there is an entire fog of social amnesia that hovers over the country,” Valdez said. “I fear the willingness of many Americans to not only deny history, but to choose to cling to their illusions and their mythologies. It's really baffling to me. But this is where I, as an artist, hope to use the power of images to try to remind others how important it is at all moments to be aware of what is going on outside in the world. I can't emphasize that enough,” he said.

Artist Vincent Valdez makes a point during an interview with Whitehot at Mass MoCA. Photo by Lisa Freeman

Another striking work, So Long, Mary Ann (2019), is an eight-foot portrait of a shirtless, tattooed man with hands clasped in contemplative prayer. While his decorated and scarred body speaks of pain, anguish and abuse, his expression suggests a troubled past giving way to maturity, sensitivity and understanding. The work reveals Valdez's agility in depicting tension across past and present, surface and depth.

Another work that draws on popular music for inspiration, the title references Leonard Cohen's 1967 song So Long, Marianne about Cohen's doomed bohemian romance with Norwegian muse Marianne Ihlen. The song and the painting share themes around the lonely struggle to overcome pain and loss. The protagonist of Cohen’s song finds a way to laugh and cry at the same time; so, it seems, has Valdez's anonymous subject. The  figure could easily be dismissed or criminalized, but instead Valdez renders him with sober dignity. It’s another example of how Valdez insists on the humanity of people American culture too often prefers to forget.

Viewers engage with the Vincent Valdez oil painting So Long, Mary Ann at Mass MoCA. Photo by Lisa Freeman

At the heart of MASS MoCA's presentation is Valdez's ongoing series The Beginning is Near (An American Trilogy), which began in 2015 and continues to evolve. 

Chapter One: The City, a monumental 30-foot 2016 painting, delivers a most unsettling indictment of persistent white supremacy in America. The work depicts dozens of figures in KKK hoods gathered in what appears to be a casual social setting—men, women, and even a baby among them, suggesting the generational transmission of hatred. What makes the painting particularly haunting is its contemporary staging: these aren't historical figures from the Jim Crow South, but modern Americans including one fondling a cell phone. The work's massive scale forces viewers into an uncomfortable intimacy with the scene, while its photorealistic precision makes its message impossible to deny. 

Chapter Two: Dream Baby Dream presents portraits of mourners from Muhammad Ali's televised funeral—what Valdez calls members of a "New American Family."

The final act, Chapter Three: The New Americans, offers intimate examinations of "everyday hope through portraits of impactful individuals, including artists, musicians, and activists, scattered across the country."

A lighted sketch of Jose Campos Torres, who was killed by Houston police in 1977, is illuminated before a Valdez sculpture, The Hole In.Memory and Notes for a Future (statue), at Mass MoCA. Photo by Lisa Freeman

The Hole in/Memory and Notes for a Future (statue), a 2024 sculpture, reveals Valdez at his most alchemical, transforming the site of a brutal murder into a vessel for both mourning and memory. Created in collaboration with partner Adriana Corral, the work incorporates soil, shells, and sediment from Buffalo Bayou—the Houston waterway where police officers beat and drowned 23-year-old Chicano Vietnam veteran Jose "Joe" Campos Torres in 1977. The resulting Virgen de Guadalupe statue bears the physical scars of this traumatic geography: bits of bayou debris fracture the white gypsum surface. The work's placement opposite a tender portrait of Torres in his Army uniform completes the circle from victim to martyr to saint, insisting that those killed by police brutality deserve not just remembrance but veneration.

MASS MoCA Chief Curator Denise Markonish, who has been collaborating with Valdez since meeting in his San Antonio studio in 2016, sees his work as essential counter-programming to this historical forgetting. "As a witness, Vincent isn't afraid to peel back the veil, to pay deep attention, and to understand that history happens the moment we capture it," she said. "He knows that the past is a ghost that haunts us in the present and his paintings unflinchingly represent truths we are often blind to."

Printer Gary Lichetenstein, left, and artist Vincent Valdez discuss art and printing at Mass MoCA. Photo by Lisa Freeman

As Valdez inhabits his MASS MoCA moment, he's also collaborating with master printer Gary Lichtenstein on a suite of new silkscreen prints. Gary Lichtenstein Editions, now located at MASS MoCA after years in the New York City area, has been working with Valdez since 2022, when they produced the Siete Dias series.

Lichtenstein is a master printer who works with artists not to make copies of artwork, but to collaborate in the creation of prints that are themselves new works of art. For Valdez, whose monumental paintings already possess a cinematic quality, the translation to print offers new possibilities for dissemination beyond traditional gallery walls.

“It just becomes such an amazing creative outpouring,” Lichtenstein said during a session with Valdez at his Mass MoCA studio the other day.  “What's really exciting is the art itself, because you can watch an evolution rapidly take shape right in front you. And I never really know where we're going to end up, but that's part of the exploration,” he said. The MASS MoCA exhibition opens as the broader cultural landscape grows increasingly hostile to the kind of work Valdez makes. But perhaps that's precisely why Valdez's work feels so urgent right now. In an era of enforced forgetting, he insists on remembering. 

“I think it's important that we remember that this struggle is nothing new, you know, especially in this country,” Valdez said. “It's very easy for an entire population to be manipulated into these kinds of very dangerous circumstances and situations. But this is the United States of America, both past and present. For many communities in this country, this has been the reality of everyday existence,” he said.

The question isn't whether America is ready for Vincent Valdez's unflinching vision. The question is whether America can afford to look away.

Vincent Valdez: Just a Dream… runs May 24, 2025-April 5, 2026 at MASS MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts. For tickets and information: massmoca.org.