Vincent Valdez Art Exhibition, Staniar Gallery

Wednesday, April 29, The Staniar Gallery

Vincent Valdez’s work consists of large-scale hyper-realistic oil and pastel works that focus on subjects with socio-political themes. In The Strangest Fruit series, Valdez explores the widespread lynching of people of Mexican descent in Texas between 1848 and 1928. While lynching of African Americans during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has received scholarly and popular attention, very little has been devoted to the lynching of hundreds of Latinos during the same period. Valdez connects the historical mistreatment of Latinos to the present by depicting men dressed in contemporary garb, positioned as if hanging from a tree or a stage, though no actual noose or lynching stage is visible in the paintings. His imagery explores the past treatment of Latinos to comment upon their present marginalization in the United States.

Vincent Valdez received his BFA from The Rhode Island School of Design in 2000. In 2004 at age 26, Valdez was the youngest artist to have a solo exhibition at the McNay Museum in San Antonio, Texas. A recipient of the Skowhegan School of Painting ’05 and The Vermont Studio Center ’11, Valdez lives and works in Firestation #15, his restored 1928 Firestation in San Antonio, TX