It’s easy to see why so many people describe Vincent Valdez’s work as prophetic. Take “Requiem,” an installation he made in collaboration with his partner, the artist Adriana Corral, centered on a bronze sculpture of a dying bald eagle lying pitiably on its back.
When it was first shown at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (Mass MoCA) in 2019, it seemed to precisely capture the mood of many Americans who were fearful for the future of the country under the first Trump administration. But it was actually created two years before the 2016 election.
Likewise, “The City,” Valdez’s 30-foot-long oil painting depicting a modern-day gathering of men, women and even a baby dressed in Ku Klux Klan hoods. Shown in 2018, it could have been a direct response to the deadly white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017. Except it, too, was made before the rally took place.
“I don’t have a crystal ball in my studio,” Valdez, 47, said in a recent telephone conversation from his studio in Houston. (He splits his time between Texas and Los Angeles.) “I’m just keeping my eyes open, especially at a moment when more and more people find it easier to just turn away from the world.”
Now museum audiences are having a chance to assess the full sweep of Valdez’s vision of America — a record of “love, struggle and survival in 21st-century America,” he calls it. His midcareer retrospective, “Just a Dream …,” opens at Mass MoCA, in North Adams, Mass., on May 25; it is the second stop for the exhibition, which debuted at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (CAMH) last November.
Visitors to Mass MoCA will find meticulously rendered drawings, paintings, bronze sculptures, etchings, videos and even a painted truck that home in on some of the most indelible and poignant images of Chicano (or Mexican American) and Latino experience. Valdez calls his devotion to a realist style and traditional art-making techniques a form of “high-definition vision.”
His subjects include exhausted, defeated boxers; the funeral of his best friend John R. Holt Jr., an Iraq War veteran who took his life in 2009 because of PTSD; televised scenes of American politics and pop culture (Oliver North’s trial, Michael Jordan’s slam dunk contest); victims of racist violence against Mexican Americans; and inspirational figures from the Latino community.
Valdez’s socially engaged art finds its focus in the often overlooked presence of Chicanos, a vision planted when he was only 9 years old, and already working alongside the artist Alex Rubio on murals around San Antonio, his hometown. His commitment to painting — as well as to the historical research demanded by these compositions — was so passionate that his high school teachers let him cut class to create murals in the school cafeteria, figuring it was the best way to keep him engaged in school. He had taught himself to draw the human form via television, asking his mother to pause the VCR so he could trace the figures on paper.
He arrived at the Rhode Island School of Design in 2000, where his penchant for anatomically precise drawings called to mind art from the Renaissance, or the 20th-century social realism of George Bellows and Paul Cadmus — decidedly out of sync with the abstract vibe.
When Valdez began working on “Kill the Pachuco Bastard!” (2001), some of his teachers balked at its frank depiction of racist and xenophobic violence, he said. The painting portrays the 1943 Zoot Suit Riots in Los Angeles, in which American servicemen attacked hundreds of predominantly Mexican American men. “I remember an instructor saying, ‘You’re never going to have a successful career if you continue to work with controversial and confrontational subject matter like this,’” he recalled.
That instructor was wrong. The painting soon caught the eye of Cheech Marin, the actor, comedian, art collector and founder of the Cheech, a center for Chicano art and culture at the Riverside Art Museum in California. On a tip from an art adviser, he traveled to San Antonio to see it. Valdez, who had moved back into his parents’ home after college, pulled it out from under his mother’s bed, Marin said in an interview. “I took one look at it and said, ‘This is great, I’ll buy it’ — it was as simple as that.”
The painting also captivated the musician Ry Cooder, who at the time was working on “Chavez Ravine,” a 2005 Grammy-nominated concept album inspired by the story of a longstanding Mexican American neighborhood in Los Angeles demolished in the 1950s. Real estate developers promised public housing; residents, forcibly removed from their homes, got Dodger Stadium instead.
Cooder had the idea of creating a painted vehicle — a homage to Chicano lowrider car culture — that would narrate the history of the event. He found Valdez’s phone number and began leaving messages, to no avail, he said in a recent interview. (“I never bothered calling back because I assumed it was a friend pulling a stunt,” Valdez said with a laugh.)
When Cooder did finally get through, he convinced Valdez to move to California. Over two years there, the painter transformed a 1953 Good Humor ice cream truck into a complex historical account of a crucial moment in Los Angeles history.
“He’s kind of a Chicano Hieronymus Bosch, or Albrecht Dürer,” Cooder said. “He has the technique, but he also brings tremendous imagination, beautiful colors and a sense of action and movement.”
Portraiture plays a central role in Valdez’s practice. “People of the Sun / El Gente de la Sol (the Santanas),” from 2018, depicting his grandparents in front of a clothesline, took three years. “It’s one of the very, very few paintings that I am content with,” Valdez said. “It speaks about the labor and the toil and the determination of creating that better life and situation in America, so that your offspring have a better way forward.”
If paintings like “The City” offer up a troubling vision of America, Valdez’s continuing series “The New Americans” points to what it could be. (“The City,” “The New Americans” and a 2018 series titled “Dream Baby Dream,” showing mourners at Muhammad Ali’s funeral, are part of a trilogy, “The Beginning Is Near.”)
“I want to paint Americans in the 21st century who, in my eyes, are still fighting the good fight, not for power, not for profit, not for fame, but because it’s still simply the right thing to do,” he said. Subjects include Sennett Devermont, a legal rights activist known as Mr. Checkpoint and founder of the AFTP (“Always Film the Police”) Foundation; his partner and sometime collaborator Adriana Corral; and the jazz musician and music education advocate Wynton Marsalis.
The artist Teresita Fernández, another subject, has been a longtime admirer. “There is a particular, very sharp sensitivity to the way Vince brings power to the act of looking,” she said in an email. “He’s very tenderly seeing layers of personhood, revealing a second, deeper layer of portraiture that’s much more subtle and intimate, beyond broad ideas of identity.”
His approach — showing both the lows and the highs of American experience — seems to resonate with museumgoers. Patricia Restrepo, a curator at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston and an organizer of the exhibition, said that attendance there included a huge number of first-time visitors and multigenerational families, many Latino.
“Parents would bring in their young children and really engage in uncomfortable and critical conversation about the ways in which white supremacy continues to operate and continues to harm them,” she said.
“I think Vincent really is able to usher in difficult conversations through the strategy of beauty and technical mastery,” she added.
Not everyone is so comfortable when confronted with the art. When “Kill the Pachuco Bastard!” was shown at the Smithsonian almost 20 years ago, Valdez recalled that curators insisted on installing it behind a curtain.
And when the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin bought “The City,” the museum kept it in storage for two years while curators considered how to display it. When they put it on view, it was hung behind a wall with content warnings for visitors who might have been troubled to see such a frank depiction of the K.K.K. Though the museum was criticized by some for its handling of the presentation, no significant protest materialized.
That painting developed out of Valdez’s study of Texas history, during which he learned that between 1848 and 1928, 547 Mexican Americans were lynched in Texas and California. The piece was also informed by his interest in the artist Philip Guston, who depicted Klan figures in his work during the 1960s and ’70s, and by his own unsettling encounter with a K.K.K. rally as a teenager.
“I didn’t make the painting to be controversial or have a shock value,” Valdez said. “My goal was to create a 30-foot mirror of America, to recreate the kinds of tensions I felt in the air outside my studio.”
He had tackled the subject with an earlier series, “Strangest Fruit,” depicting Chicano men — modeled by family and friends — in poses suggestive of victims, hanging against blank backgrounds like the martyred saints of the Renaissance. “No one was bothered by those paintings,” he noted. “People are more comfortable seeing the victims of violence than the perpetrators.”
Both CAMH and Mass MoCA made the decision to present “The City” straightforwardly; at Mass MoCA, it is one of the first things visitors see. “Vincent is unflinching,” said Denise Markonish, who co-curated “Just a Dream …” “We, as a museum, should be too.”
The payoff of close looking is apparent in works like “So Long, Mary Ann,” Valdez’s searing 2019 portrait, whose name alludes to a Leonard Cohen song about heartbreak. It shows a young man — shirtless, with a shaved head, tattoos covering his body. But push past the surface, past the current discourse around tattooed Latino gang members, and his expression is mournful, tender and vulnerable. Look closer still, and you will see a tiny cross reflected in the young man’s eye.
It’s this attention that makes Valdez a singular artist, Markonish said. “He paints a picture of his grandparents with as much care as he paints the Klan,” she said. “In taking the time to render these things, he’s confronting them in a really intimate way. He’s doing himself what he is asking us to do, which is not look away.”
Vincent Valdez: Just a Dream …
May 25, 2025, to April 5, 2026. Mass MoCA, 1040 Mass MoCA Way, North Adams, Mass.; 413-662-2111, www.massmoca.org.
Aruna D’Souza writes about modern and contemporary art and is the author of “Whitewalling: Art, Race & Politics in 3 Acts.” In 2021 she was awarded a Rabkin Prize for Art Journalism.
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