Vincent Valdez

About Vincent's Work

Vincent Valdez is a visual artist depicting historical and present-day scenes that reflect Latino experiences and the contemporary United States. His work draws from Chicano artistic traditions that center political and social histories often obscured in mainstream media. At the same time, his detailed imagery and cinematic compositions are in dialogue with Western traditions of narrative history painting and portraiture. Across his body of work, Valdez goes beyond depicting past moments of injustice to interrogating how injustice, violence, and resistance persist in the present.

Valdez’s early work El Chavez Ravine (2005-2007) is an inventive homage to Mexican and American mural traditions, made in collaboration with American musician Ry Cooder. For the work, Valdez painted the entire body of a 1953 Good Humor ice cream truck with imagery depicting figures and scenes relating to the displacement of a predominantly Mexican-American community in Los Angeles for the construction of Dodger Stadium in the 1950s. In The Beginning Is Near, An American Trilogy: The City I (2015-2016), he brings the past and present into unsettling proximity. The monumentally scaled work comprises four canvases that together measure 30 feet in length. It portrays a gathering of robed and hooded Ku Klux Klansmen, most of whom are facing the viewer. The piece is foreboding in scale; and while the black and white palette recalls historical imagery, a Chevrolet truck, glowing iPhone, and utility tower anchor the work squarely in the present. Valdez bears witness to a rare moment of unity across race and religion in the The Beginning Is Near, An American Trilogy, Ch. II: Dream Baby Dream (2018) series of 12 works that depict mourners and scenes from the television coverage of Muhammed Ali’s funeral. The series captures the emotions and different kinds of people who were impacted by Ali and attests to our ability to come together acoss faultlines.

In his most recent series, It Was a Very Good Year (2024- ), Valdez eplores the ways in which media can forge collective memories. This series includes drawings and large-scale paintings of key events in the 1980s, including Michael Jordan’s famous dunk from the free throw line, Lt. Col. Oliver North testifying before Congress about the Iran-Contra affair, and the Challenger space shuttle explosion. Through his sustained engagement with social and political conditions that structure American life, Valdez is establishing new lines of connection between imagery, history, and our present moment.