Join artist Vincent Valdez in conversation with poet, essayist, and cultural critic Hanif Abdurraqib in conjunction with Valdez’s exhibition Just a Dream… The two will discuss what it means to be American today through the lens of art, politics, music, and basketball. The artists will sign books in MASS MoCA’s Research & Development Store following the talk.

About the Artists:
Vincent Valdez (b. 1977, San Antonio, TX) lives and works in Houston, TX and Los Angeles, CA. He received a full scholarship to the Rhode Island School of Design, earning his BFA in 2000. He was a recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant for Painters and Sculptors (2016), and he completed residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting (2005), the Vermont Studio Center (2011), the Kunstlerhaus Bethanien Berlin Residency (2014), and Joan Mitchell Center (2018). Valdez was the 2019 Artadia awardee in Houston, TX, and a 2020 artist fellow at NXTHVN in New Haven. Recent exhibitions include The Face of Battle: Americans at War, 9/11 to Now, Smithsonian Museum of American Art and National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC; So Different, So Appealing, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; The City, Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, TX; Between Play and  Grief: Selections from the Permanent Collection, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Suffering from Realness, MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA; and ESTAMOS BIEN: LA TRIENAL 20/21, El Museo del Barrio, New York, NY. The artist has been shortlisted as a finalist for the Smithsonian’s 2022 National Portrait Award. Valdez’s portrait of his grandparents was presented in The Outwin 2022: American Portraiture Today, a major exhibition premiering at the National Portrait Gallery from April 30, 2022 through February 26, 2023, before traveling to other cities in the United States. He is  represented by Matthew Brown Gallery in Los Angeles, CA.

Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. His poetry has been published in Muzzle, Vinyl, PEN American, and various other journals. His essays and music criticism have been published in The FADER, Pitchfork, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. His first full length poetry collection, The Crown Ain’t Worth Much, was released in June 2016 from Button Poetry. It was named a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Prize, and was nominated for a Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. With Big Lucks, he released a limited edition chapbook, Vintage Sadness, in summer 2017 (you cannot get it anymore and he is very sorry.) His first collection of essays, They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, was released in winter 2017 by Two Dollar Radio and was named a book of the year by Buzzfeed, Esquire, NPR, Oprah Magazine, Paste, CBC, The Los Angeles Review, Pitchfork, and The Chicago Tribune, among others. He released Go Ahead In The Rain: Notes To A Tribe Called Quest with University of Texas press in February 2019. The book became a New York Times Bestseller, was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize, and was longlisted for the National Book Award. His second collection of poems, A Fortune For Your Disaster, was released in 2019 by Tin House, and won the 2020 Lenore Marshall Prize. In 2021, he released the book A Little Devil In America with Random House, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the The PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. The book won the 2022 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction and the Gordon Burn Prize. Abdurraqib is a graduate of Beechcroft High School.

Photo: Megan Leigh Barnard