Vincent Valdez bears witness to the world around him, chronicling America at the margins. Just a Dream… is the artist's first major museum survey including work from over twenty years across all media. The exhibition is co-organized by MASS MoCA between 2024 and 2026.
The accompanying publication features writings addressing Valdez's work through the lens of American politics today, addressing topics such as boxing, lynchings of Mexican Americans, border walls, politics, greed, the Ku Klux Klan, and the failings and triumphs of society. The bilingual (English/Spanish) catalogue is lushly illustrated and features a gatefold and a special sewn in booklet of behind-the-scenes studio images.
Texts include a re-print of Joyce Carol Oates' On Boxing, essays by exhibition curators Denise Markonish and Patricia Restrepo; and writing on the artist's relationship to Texas by Evan Garza. This exhibition and publication will cement Valdez as one of the most important American painters working today – imaging his country, its people, politics, pride, and foibles.
Published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibitions at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston November 16, 2024 – March 23, 2025, and MASS MoCA May 25, 2025 – March 29, 2026.
Vincent Valdez (born 1977 in San Antonio, Texas, lives and works in Houston and Los Angeles) 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."
Valdez is a recipient of the Ford and Mellon Foundations Latinx Artist Fellowship (2022), Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant for Painters and Sculptors (2016), as well as residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting (2005), the Vermont Studio Center (2011), the Kunstlerhaus Bethania Berlin Residency (2014), and the Arion Press' King Residency (2023). Exhibitions and Collections include: The Ford Foundation, The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, MASS MoCA, The Museum of Fine Arts Houston, The Smithsonian Museum of American Art, and The National Portrait Gallery, among others.
