Vincent Valdez stood below a projected image of his painting “The City I” — depicting a Klan gathering in black and white — and referenced a quote attributed to Gore Vidal: “We are the United States of amnesia; We learn nothing because we remember nothing.”
On Oct. 24, Valdez spoke at the Benson Auditorium for this year’s Pitzer College Art Galleries Pepper Distinguished Visiting Artist and Scholar Lecture.
Valdez’s work, much of which takes the form of large-scale figurative painting, takes up the mantle of remembering — of filling in gaps, bearing witness against disappearances within the narrative of American history.
“Art holds truth,” audience member Ashe West Lewis PZ ’26 said. “Art relating to political movements really brings more life to them.”
In his fight against collective amnesia, and towards truth, Valdez often takes his home state of Texas as a site of observation. Growing up in San Antonio, he remembers visiting The Alamo — a historic mission-turned-fortress and symbol of Texan freedom — as a child.
“Growing up in a state like Texas … there’s this level of, you know, for lack of a better word, indoctrination,” Valdez said. “When you grow up around the sort of mythology of something like the Alamo, this sort of mythical sort of escapism that we see a lot of in a region like Texas, there’s this idea of fighting for one’s own birthright and freedom and liberty.”
At the same time as it embodies a collective desire to forget, Texas and its communities are often forgotten in the national narrative and formation of American identity. The state seems to be always at the edge of America.
“I made it a mission to do anything that I could to try to get my story as well as the story of my community to be recognized, not only inside the studio but within the contemporary art world,” Valdez said. “And I think that 20 years later, you know, I’m still on the same quest and it’s still just as challenging as it was.”
“I was so drawn to the world around me that I wanted to put it all down on record. Leave a visual testimony to what it was that I was experiencing, what I was feeling, as I began maturing.”
His series of large-scale paintings “The Strangest Fruit” (2013), for example, takes as its subject the oft-forgotten lynchings of Mexican Americans in the American Southwest, from Southern California down to South Texas. Men in contemporary clothes float in the center of each canvas as if hanging. The noose, in each portrait, is implied but invisible — present but unseen. Several paintings from the series now hang in the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas.
Speaking about a 2019 painting of his grandparents, “People of the Sun (Grandparents Santana),” Valdez elucidated the role of his work as testimony; the double portrait tells the story of “[his]family, [his] community, the Chicano community, the American Southwest.” The artist’s grandparents, looking straight ahead, are framed by a blue bed sheet.
“Coming from a long line of storytellers, my role … is to use the human figure and the portrait as a catalyst for telling stories,” Valdez said. “I think that everything I need in terms of constructing a narrative can be told through a single pair of hands, or a face and torso.”
Valdez has conceptualized art as a witness since he started painting at a young age.
“I was so drawn to the world around me that I wanted to put it all down on record,” he said. “Leave a visual testimony to what it was that I was experiencing, what I was feeling, as I began maturing.”
When he was 10 years old, Valdez watched the 1987 film “Platoon” in a silent theater and felt compelled to not only leave a visual record but also captivate his audience.
“I thought, ‘That’s what I want to do,’” he said. “I have to find a way to pull a viewer in so much that you feel something, I can’t help but think that at a moment like this, it rings more true than it ever has for me personally.”
This sensitivity to audience seems central to how Valdez conceptualizes his work. While some other artists create without audience in mind, he considers who needs to see his work — who needs to look at what they might not want to.
At the same time, though, Valdez thinks about who will likely see the work — where these paintings will actually hang, and who will own them in the contemporary art world. The artist’s mother, he said, upon seeing “The City I,” asked him what she was supposed to be seeing that she didn’t already know.
Valdez’s lecture came two weeks before the general election, Pitzer Art Galleries Director Emily Butts noted. The issues of national identity and American empire that he addresses are increasingly at the forefront of viewers’ minds.
“[Valdez’s] work … feels even more urgent during an election season when we are asked to reflect on our nation’s past, present and future through powerful visual narratives,” Butts said.
However, Valdez says his work confronts an apathy and violence that pervades American life at all times — beyond any election season.
“These are numbing times,” he said. “[It’s] overwhelming every day … It’s hard to feel anything but a sense of apathy. That’s the true danger and the real threat. I think that goes far beyond any kind of election. It’s the risk of giving in, as a collective, to apathy.”
He aims to jolt viewers out of this malaise, and to reject the notion that art is passive. Art is a real world practice; it can, and must, counter apathy and amnesia. Valdez ended his lecture by imploring his audience to continue this work.
“I think that artists have always historically been the messengers, right?” he said. “Great artists, actors, poets … they are the ghosts that constantly remind us to keep fighting. Question everything, find solutions, find ways of uplifting each other. You can’t throw in the towel.”
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