{"id":190863,"date":"2025-12-14T05:08:25","date_gmt":"2025-12-14T05:08:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/190863\/"},"modified":"2025-12-14T05:08:25","modified_gmt":"2025-12-14T05:08:25","slug":"vincent-valdezs-commentary-on-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/190863\/","title":{"rendered":"Vincent Valdez’s commentary on America"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"VincentVincent Valdez, “So Long, MaryAnn,” 2019.
\nAs installed in “Just a Dream…” at MASS MoCA until April 2026. Jon Verney<\/p>\n

That said, he knows how to grab hold of fleeting attention \u2014 a tableau of klansmen takes care of that \u2014 but more importantly, knows what to do with it once he has it. And now that he has your attention, there is depth and subtlety to be found across a virtuosic oeuvre brimming with humanity and grace. Above all, Valdez insists that the unseen be seen, and he undermines the power structures that work to keep them invisible. <\/p>\n

I\u2019ll admit that that much certainly feels timely. In an era when immigration shock troops are tackling suspected illegal migrants on city streets and hustling them away in unmarked cars, the constant flow of hurried phone footage of this outrageous ad hoc brutality has helped transform what might otherwise register in the daily news as a statistic into the rough, inhuman practice it actually is. Valdez, in his way, completes the picture. Beyond the immediate shock, Valdez humanizes, deepens, and presents recent immigrants with nobility and grace. <\/p>\n

\"VincentVincent Valdez, “The Beginning is Near, An American Trilogy, Ch. 2: “Dream, Baby, Dream,” 2018. Installed at Mass MOCA in “Vincent Valdez: Just a Dream …”Murray Whyte\/Globe Staff<\/p>\n

A selection of life-sized portraits from his recent series \u201cThe Beginning Is Near: An American Trilogy, Ch. 3: The New Americans,\u201d provides an understated but powerful counterpoint to the exhibition\u2019s incipient shock. \u201cJuan Cartegena,\u201d 2021, portrays a balding middle-aged man in an urban alleyway. He wears a suit, his fingers are interlocked, and a graying fringe of neatly-trimmed beard and hair frame an expression of stoic, serene determination. \u201cMr. Checkpoint,\u201d 2021, captures a young man with a skateboard at an intersection; a police car wails past, but he\u2019s unperturbed. Both project an air of contemplative grace, a getting-on-with-it stance that fastens the immigrant experience to the quotidienne normalcy most of us aspire to. <\/p>\n

This, of course, is \u201cChapter 3\u201d for a reason. \u201cThe Beginning Is Near: An American Trilogy, Ch.1: The City\u201d is the title of the painting of those klansmen, as grim a starting point to Valdez\u2019s tale as you could imagine. Look closely: the crowd includes women, and a wide-eyed infant in a tiny hood and robe. There\u2019s an echo here of Philip Guston<\/a>\u2019s infamous series of klansmen<\/a> in mundane everyday chores \u2014 at the office, standing in line, or cruising aimlessly in a car through city streets. It was an unnerving portrait of the banality of evil \u2014 and of how hatred has festered not in full-throated rallies in the dead of night but woven through everyday America at its most otherwise normal. <\/p>\n

\"VincentVincent Valdez, “The Beginning Is Near: An American Trilogy, Ch. 3: The New Americans.\u201d Left: \u201cJuan Cartegena,\u201d 2021; R: \u201cMr. Checkpoint,\u201d 2021. Jon Verney<\/p>\n

But in the broader arc of Valdez\u2019s intent, it\u2019s not impossible to read it as the scorched earth that allows hope to grow. Chapter 2, \u201cDream Baby Dream,\u201d doesn\u2019t inspire optimism either. A grid of portraits rendered in inky black and silver tones of a spectrum of figures \u2014 a woman in a hijab. a trio of Native American men, a pair of Tibetan monks, a wizened rabbi \u2013 speaking at a podium wreathed in flowers \u2014 it has the unmistakable sense of a funeral. <\/p>\n

Made in 2018, amid the shock of vast social regression gripping the nation during Trump\u2019s first term, you can read the piece as a requiem. In one frame, the stripes of the American flag dangle in the ombre, alone. The dream, clearly, is the American archetype: Of the limitless possibility of anyone from anywhere making the life they want here, then, as now, dangling by a thread. A painting of a black wreath, hung apart, makes space for renewal. \u201cIt\u2019s the dream that keeps,\u201d reads gothic script strung along a ribbon that binds it. It\u2019s a reminder, at least to me, that America has found itself in darkness before, and made its way to the light. <\/p>\n

\"LL to R: Vincent Valdez, “The Beginning is Near, An American Trilogy, Ch. 1: The City II,” 2016: “The Strangest Fruit,” 2013. Installed at Mass MOCA in “Vincent Valdez: Just a Dream …” until April 2026. (Murray Whyte\/Globe Staff) 00mocaMurray Whyte\/Globe Staff<\/p>\n

It was, in this moment, heavy with emotion, something I needed to see. One thing to understand about the exhibition: It is very much about seeing, almost entirely unencumbered with blocks of explanatory text and didactics, except for very practical purpose. I have to think this was Valdez\u2019s doing as much as the work itself, making \u201cJust a Dream \u2026\u201d as open a read as you\u2019ll find. (If you dig deeper, you\u2019ll learn \u201cDream Baby Dream\u201d is in fact a depiction of the funeral of Muhammed Ali, but I\u2019d almost rather not know; its lament is, and should — be, broader, whatever the impacts of Ali\u2019s tireless war against injustice.) What you bring to it bears mightily on what you\u2019ll get out of it. You might learn more about yourself than anything else, and there\u2019s no greater purpose for art than that. <\/p>\n

Even so, Valdez is hardly hands off, and he makes clear that any path, whether to darkness or enlightenment, is hardly straight. \u201cThe Strangest Fruit,\u201d a series of 2013 full-length portraits of young men on stark white backgrounds as though in mid-air, has the obvious echo of the Billie Holiday<\/a> tune about southern lynchings in the 1930s<\/a>; a small sculptural piece recreates the front page of the Los Angeles Times in 1992, when the acquittal of the officers charged with beating Rodney King sparked widespread riots. \u201cBush Ordering Troops to L.A.,\u201d the black line head, is heavy with foreshadows of the here and now. <\/p>\n

\"InstallationInstallation view of “Vincent Valdez: Just a Dream…” at MASS MoCA. Jon Verney<\/p>\n

And the most blunt piece here, \u201cThe Hole\/In Memory (For Joe Campos Torres),\u201d 2024, extracts a horror of racial injustice from Texas history: In 1977, Torres, a veteran, was arrested and then taken to Buffalo Bayou, where he was beaten and drowned by the arresting officers. In 2021, the Houston police department finally acknowledged and apologized for the murder. The piece pairs a portrait of Torres in miltary dress uniform by Valdez with a statue of the Virgin Mary by Adriana Corral, cast from the clay of Buffalo Bayou. <\/p>\n

You get the idea. Valdez leans easily into activist territory, and doesn\u2019t hesitate to use his ample gifts in blunt and righteous fashion. And they are ample. Don\u2019t miss, because how could you, the fact that Valdez is an extraordinary painter. His old master-worthy images in \u201cDream Baby Dream\u201d are particularly disarming; the furious seas of \u201cGodspeed,\u201d 2019, of a tallship struggling against a surge of rogue waves in a steel-gray ocean, is extraordinary. <\/p>\n

\"VincentVincent Valdez and Ry Cooder, “\u201cEl Chavez Ravine,\u201d 2005-07. As installed in “Just a Dream…” at MASS MoCA, through April 2026. Jon Verney<\/p>\n

But Valdez is also a reminder that, throughout history, some of the most powerful art has been the product of the worst circumstances. Recently in Madrid, I was able to stand in front of Picasso\u2019s \u201cGuernica,\u201d his 1939 epic lament for the carnage of the onset of Spanish fascism, a convulsion of violent inhumanity at its most extreme. An eruption of grief at the wholesale bombing of the town of Guernica by Franco-allied Nazi forces, it\u2019s perhaps his most powerful work. <\/p>\n

Valdez less favors grand individual gestures than a long view. His work reads as a steady accretion of oppression interwoven with the the occasional triumph of resistance and justice. In 2005, Valdez teamed up with the musician Ry Cooder to make \u201cEl Chavez Ravine,\u201d a 1953 Good Humor ice cream truck that Valdez emblazoned with an epic narrative oil painting that captured the story of the forcible eviction of the Mexican American community in El Chavez to make way for the construction of Dodger Stadium (Cooder made an album, \u201cChavez Ravine,\u201d about the story). A real world emblem of innocent youth festooned with a shameful chapter of gentrification, discrimination, and displacement \u2013 all elements in urban America right now, suffering the worst housing crisis maybe in its history \u2013 it coalesces Valdez\u2019s long view, where art and activism meet. It all adds up, and Valdez is profoundly invested in the tally.<\/p>\n

VINCENT VALDEZ: JUST A DREAM … <\/p>\n

Through April 5. Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, 1040 Mass MoCA Way, North Adams. 413-662-2111, www.massmoca.org. <\/p>\n

Murray Whyte can be reached at murray.whyte@globe.com<\/a>. Follow him @TheMurrayWhyte<\/a>.<\/p>\n