Published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibitions at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston November 15, 2024 – March 23, 2025, and MASS MoCA May 24, 2025 – April 5, 2026.
Vincent Valdez (born 1977in 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.
