HOUSTON, TX.- Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (CAMH) is presenting Vincent Valdez: Just a Dream…, the artist’s first museum survey, and the first time CAMH has dedicated the entire museum to a single artist. Co-organized by CAMH and Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA), the exhibition spans over two decades of his work, from early career drawings to recent monumental portraits. Just a Dream… cements Valdez as one of the most important American painters working today— imaging his country and its people, politics, pride, and foibles.
Explore the striking imagery and poignant themes of Just a Dream... by Vincent Valdez.
Born in San Antonio, Texas, Valdez began painting murals at age ten, catalyzing a lifelong commitment to ‘create images about people, and for people’. He makes artwork to counter the social amnesia he sees recurring through history, encouraging us to find new paths forward by reckoning with the past. Valdez asserts that the unfolding American tale is an ever-expanding range of experiences which includes the historic contributions and legacy of Mexican-Americans. His work to the unspoken or forgotten reminds us of our agency in writing a more just future.
Valdez often works in series, and Just a Dream… unites 25 years of work for the first time, like chapters in a book chronicling the United States. One of Valdez’s most significant ongoing series is The Beginning is Near (An American Trilogy), consisting of Chapter One: The City; Chapter Two: Dream Baby Dream; and Chapter Three: The New Americans. The trilogy’s first chapter examines America’s prevailing system of white supremacy in its various forms of overt and covert existence traced throughout the American landscape, past and present.
Chapter Two: Dream Baby Dream presents a gridded portrait of a “New American Family”. Instead, this gathering of mourners is from the televised eulogy for Muhammad Ali’s funeral. The final act, Chapter Three: The New Americans, offers intimate examinations of everyday hope through portraits of impactful individuals, including artists, musicians, and activists, scattered across the country.
Valdez consistently coalesces momentary and collective observations on U.S. contemporary life, presenting American mythos, broadcasted live events, community, and family portraits all together in the same space. He channels the nation’s realities across monumental works, harkening towards large-scale murals and cinematic formats, addressing storied injustices without ignoring individual humanity.
The artist’s work is grounded in the quote by writer Gore Vidal: “We are the United States of Amnesia, we learn nothing because we remember nothing” Valdez pushes against the distortive qualities of American history, and instead presents truths often overlooked. He reflects the current political landscape back to us, reiterating reality when fact and figment become blurred.
“Valdez’s creative practice has the uncanny ability to speak to our present moment despite the years, and even decades, since the works’ creation. Yet, its relevance extends beyond this slice of time by excavating buried facets of our country’s past to incite avenues for more equitable futures,” says the exhibition co-curator and CAMH Curator Patricia Restrepo. “Valdez demonstrates why we turn to artists in moments of precarity: he crystalizes our condition with layered symbolism, obsessive details, conceptual clarity, and acerbic wit.”
“Vincent is fearless. He becomes our eyes when we are too exhausted or frightened to see, and most importantly, he provides truth”, says MASS MoCA Chief Curator Denise Markonish. “This perspective was evident from the moment we met in 2016 in his studio, and we’ve been collaborating ever since beginning with Suffering From Realness (2019) at MASS MoCA. Just a Dream... signifies a twenty-five year survey of the artist’s work and calls on us to more deeply examine the inequitable history of America and invites new perspectives to prevail. I am truly honored to be able to present his vision both at MASS MoCA in North Adams and in Houston with my collaborator’s at CAMH.”
Valdez, though trained as a painter, works across drawing, printmaking, sculpture, and multimedia installation to weave together complex themes and interrogate the porousness of American identity. The American arena of struggle (in its vast forms) operates as a multifaceted metaphor and a powerful symbol that invites curiosity from each viewer. His color palette spans from the socio-political landscape of the American Southwest to the greyscale of newsprint media. So too do his subjects vary.
His extensive body of work refuses categorization, iterating and expanding upon the definition of what “America” is. Valdez celebrates everyday people, like his own family and friends, as empowered, formidable, and resilient, while challenging traditional and historic symbols of power within contemporary society.
For Houston’s presentation of Just a Dream…, Valdez presents newly commissioned work in CAMH’s lower level exploring the local undertold history of 23-year-old Joe Campos Torres, a victim of police brutality in 1977, the same year Valdez was born. A Houstonian and decorated military veteran, Torres was arrested after an altercation. His murder at the hands of police officers serves as one of the most notorious examples of police misconduct in Houston’s history and ignited an intense period of protest over the next several years as Torres became a symbol of the Chicano movement and subsequent police reform. Valdez, in collaboration with artist Adriana Corral, has responded to this tragedy by creating a multi-part memorial within the exhibition. Valdez and Corral have worked to combine natural elements sourced from The Hole, a site located along Houston’s Buffalo Bayou notorious for police beatings, interrogations, and Torres’s death.
“This exhibition is a 25 year testament to my love and commitment for creating images as instruments that ignite public remembrance,” says artist Vincent Valdez. “Presented for the very first time is a two-decade conversation that has persistently occurred between the world and my studio. A close examination of what I have chosen to confront as opposed to what I turn away from. This exhibition, in collaboration with CAMH and MASS MoCA, marks an important moment in my lifelong effort to create images about people, for people. I offer this work as a report. My visual testimony about an unfolding tale of hope, struggle, and survival in twenty-first century America.”
The exhibition will open at MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts on May 24, 2025 and will remain on view until April 5, 2026.
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