'America gives me no shortage of subject matter': Vincent Valdez on making art that connects communities

In an episode of the PBS documentary series American Masters, the musician Ry Cooder described the painter Vincent Valdez as “the Albrecht Dürer of Chicano artists”. This sobriquet is appropriate, given the virtuosic detail of his images, but the pathos and cinematic intensity that defines Valdez’s work feels fiercer than that comparison implies. Born in San Antonio, Texas, Valdez has forged a career as a storyteller and fearless translator of marginalised American experiences, using allegory and confrontational figuration to address the failures and triumphs of contemporary US society.

Vincent Valdez: Just a Dream… is the artist’s first major museum survey, co-organised by the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (CAMH, until 23 March) and the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (Mass Moca, 24 May 2025-5 April 2026). Spanning painting, video, drawing and sculpture, Just a Dream… chronicles two decades of Valdez's creative production, including never-before seen work and early-career gems from his childhood and his undergraduate days at Rhode Island School of Design.

Valdez’s compositions are unflinching in their subject matter and arresting in their directness—whether he is depicting the brutalisation of Chicano bodies during the 1943 Zoot Suit Riots in Los Angeles or the chilling ubiquity of the modern Ku Klux Klan, the artist uses frank, atmospheric realism to immerse the viewer in the psychic space of his subjects. Nowhere in his oeuvre is this more evident than in his The Strangest Fruit series from 2013, a suite of nine paintings depicting Mexican and Mexican American men suspended from invisible nooses. Named after the anti-lynching song popularised by jazz singer Billie Holiday, the series exposes the under-reported impact of state-sponsored extralegal executions in the Mexican American community, bringing that violence to light in a stark and haunting visual language.

As the US tilts further and further toward a xenophobic and authoritarian nationalism—with the country's cultural funding hanging in the balance—forthright, authentic voices like Valdez’s are more important than ever before. The Art Newspaper caught up with Valdez to talk politics, patriotism and painting.

The Art Newspaper: In terms of your storytelling choices, when does an idea cease to be a painting and need to be a sculpture or a multimedia installation?

Vincent Valdez: Over the course of two-plus decades in the exhibition, and over the course of a lifetime, really, it's been a long learned process of being true to my creative instincts. Ideas appear in my mind normally during my sleep or when I'm standing in the shower for whatever reason. I allow the concept to dictate the kind of execution it's going to require. So, for example, a series like the Strangest Fruit paintings, which were a series of nine or ten canvases, I tried to keep true to the way that I first originally envisioned them in my own imagination. Recently, with a series of sculptures that I started to delve into, the subject matter itself, in some instances, requires for it to be existing in a three-dimensional format.

Given the way the current US political regime is targeting the Mexican American community, how do you feel about the direction of your work? How do you want to communicate those feelings?

Even in a moment like this, people still aren't asking these types of questions, especially inside the art world. The work for me personally only stands as more of a conviction over the course of my lifetime—the idea of my own glimpse at our collective American social amnesia, now more so than ever. It's always been my quest to try to enable people to further examine what is right in front of our very noses, but in many ways, Americans choose to remain painfully trapped in their own mythology—denial. A moment like this only defines 21st-century America even further; that for most communities of colour, this is nothing new. This reality has always been a part of our existence and realities faced in contemporary American society.

America gives me no shortage of subject matter, you know. But I don't really set out in the studio to try to slap people in the face or hit them over the head with a sledgehammer. I have always felt that it is my responsibility, both as an artist and as a citizen, to take a stance. The great historian Howard Zinn said: “You cannot remain neutral on a moving train.” And I don't minimalise my subject matter in any way. For me, a clear glimpse of society as I see it is my own way of keeping true to my own vision.

In the context of putting together a career survey, does looking back on your entire career impact the process of making new work at all?

When I see how much work comprises the exhibition, Just a Dream..., over 150 works, I get a sense that, OK, maybe I'm ready to retire (laughs). In the exhibition, a really special portion of the exhibit, a small hidden gem for the viewers in there is a set of flat files that they brought from my studio stored in San Antonio. In this exhibition, we encourage viewers to interact with the work, which is a rare thing. They open the flat files and they can trace a chronological timeline of my artistic path starting from age three in some of my earliest drawings all the way to the present.

One of the things that an exhibition like this has really presented me with is a true opportunity to view my work entirely as a spectator, a viewer, an audience member, as opposed to the creator. There's very few pieces that I don't flinch at after encountering them out in the world, constantly picking them apart. This is one of the very first times in my life that I'm able to just appreciate and enjoy the work and this vision that's been unfolding like an ongoing novel over the course of a lifetime. It's given me a chance to reflect on what I'm not as interested in any further, right? I see the gaps of unexplored territory—more etchings or more sculpture, maybe some more video work. As far as subject matter, I really try not to dictate that. I really let the world outside the studio doors kind of absorb that, and whichever direction it's going to lead me, I'm willing to follow.

Who do you consider your art historical predecessors? 

You know, in all honesty, my earliest influences back in the day continue today. I haven't so much been art historically focused. My references are filmmakers. I've been very moved over my lifetime by the scale of the movie screen. It shaped so much of my own perception about Americanism, my American identity and my role and place in this ongoing narrative. But primarily, I started at age nine years old as a muralist. I loved the scale of monumental murals, and I was looking at the Chicano muralists, who I was so proud to be a torchbearer for, in their historic legacy of mural-making in America. It really gave me that grand scope of vision in terms of a social context.

What do you think a mural or a mural-size painting accomplishes that a film doesn't?

Undeniable presence, right? A mural permanently resides, is born and lives in a community and in many ways, I consider a movie theater the same way. You have an audience, it builds like that temporary community, right? This focus on building a relationship between image and viewer, that to me was such a powerful force in life. It was an unspoken, invisible, but present communication, a dialogue, a conversation between the viewer and a picture. I remember seeing the ability of a community that claimed these murals as their own, protected them and enshrined them as sacred mementos of their own histories and their own ongoing struggles. And I thought, for me, that was it. This is what I needed to spend the rest of my life trying to figure out how to do for people. 

• Vincent Valdez: Just a Dream..., until 23 March, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston
• Vincent Valdez: Just a Dream..., 24 May 2025-5 April 2026, Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams, Massachusetts