Following the opening of his exhibition last May, Vincent Valdez returns to North Adams on November 1 for a public conversation with MASS MoCA Curator, Evan Garza, about his first career survey exhibition Just a Dream…

Valdez and Garza will talk through select bodies of work on view in the exhibition, detailing the personal and cultural variables which led to their creation. In the process, Valdez and Garza will examine uniquely American values and legacies, unpacking the ways in which cultural differences make us more interconnected than we’re often led to believe.

Valdez will be in the R&D Store following the talk to sign the Just a Dream… exhibition catalogue.

About the Exhibition:
Vincent Valdez: Just a Dream… is the artist’s first major museum survey and spans over two decades of his work, from early career drawings to current allegorical portraits. Working across painting, video, drawing, sculpture, lithography, and multimedia installation, Valdez deftly addresses the failings and triumphs of contemporary American society with a reverential focus on collective memory and overlooked political histories. Valdez states, “I create images as instruments to probe the past in order to reveal an immediacy to what is occurring today. I am alarmed by the denial of history. I will continue to create counter-images to impede the social amnesia that includes our fateful desire to repeat it.”

Learn more about the exhibition here.

About the Speakers:
Vincent Valdez blends large, representational paintings—the scale of which recalls Western traditions of history painting as well as mural painting and cinema—with contemporary subject matter. He focuses on subjects that explore his observations and experience of life in the twenty-first century. The results are powerful images of American identity that confront injustice and inequity while imbuing his subjects with empathy and humanity. A recipient of the Ford and Mellon Foundations Latinx Artist Fellowship (2022) and Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant for Painters and Sculptors (2016), as well as residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting (2005), the Vermont Studio Center (2011), the Kunstlerhaus Bethanien Berlin Residency (2014), and the Arion Press’ King Residency (2023), Valdez currently lives and works between Houston and Los Angeles. Exhibitions and collections include: The Ford Foundation, The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, MASS MoCA, The Museum of Fine Arts Houston, The Smithsonian Museum of American Art, and The National Portrait Gallery, among others.

A Houston native, Evan Garza is a global contemporary art scholar and Curator at MASS MoCA. Previously, Garza was one of six fellows in the museum’s Curatorial Exchange Initiative (CEI) program, for which they curated the exhibition Steve Locke: the fire next time. Previously, they held curatorial positions in Texas as Director of Rice Public Art at Rice University in Houston and Assistant Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin. In 2011, Garza was cofounder of Fire Island Artist Residency (FIAR), a New York nonprofit and the first residency program in the world exclusively for LGBTQ+ artists. Their writing has been published in several books and journals, and they are editor of the forthcoming monograph, Steve Locke: I said what I said. Garza earned their M.A. from the Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art at the Clark Art Institute.