'Just a Dream' offers glimpse of tragedy and triumph of life in contemporary America

Transcript

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Geoff Bennett: It’s a portrait of an artist capturing parts of his own history and ours. He’s been doing it since childhood and is now in the spotlight with his first national touring exhibition.

Senior arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown talks with Vincent Valdez for our arts and culture series, Canvas.

Jeffrey Brown: The paintings are often large in scale, almost cinematic in effect, the imagery confrontational, packing a punch, 120 works, now at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston by artist Vincent Valdez.

This is art as provocation?

Vincent Valdez, Artist: It’s art as truth. It’s the truth the way that I see it. It’s the truth that — based off of my recollections and observations, my hard examinations about life in the world beyond these studio doors.

Jeffrey Brown: The exhibition, titled Just a Dream presents 25 years of work, series of paintings, or what Valdez sees as chapters, that look at both personal and collective histories. It is his first major survey, a chance for the 48 year old artist to take stock.

Vincent Valdez: I was able to get a glimpse of the story that I have been telling, and that story, my subject has been life in contemporary America in both its tragedy and its triumph.

Jeffrey Brown: You can see that in all the works over the decades.

Vincent Valdez: Absolutely, not only my own personal reflection on contemporary American society, but my own active participation in contemporary America.

Jeffrey Brown: These days, Valdez splits his time between Houston and Los Angeles, where we met in December at his studio filled with large-scale panels of paintings in progress. On this day, he was at work on something smaller, a portrait of one set of grandparents, and on a series of drawings based on Kurt Vonnegut’s classic anti-war novel “Slaughterhouse-Five.”

His own engagement with art goes back to his childhood in San Antonio, Texas, first surrounded by done by a surrounded by work done by a great-grandfather, Jose Maria Valdez, hanging in his grandparents’ house,then, beginning at age 10, as part of a project working on large-scale murals around the city.

Woman: Eleven-year-old Vincent Valdez is painting a scene of nature and animals.

Jeffrey Brown: A year later, the young artist was featured in a local news story.

Vincent Valdez: If there’s still nuclear being dropped everywhere, will there still be animals?

Jeffrey Brown: With murals, you get the enormous scale. You get that kind of storytelling.

Vincent Valdez: Yes.

Jeffrey Brown: Clearly, those — that impacted you.

Vincent Valdez: Tremendously. And it struck me like a thunderbolt, where it has to tell a story and it has to utilize storytelling as a means of communicating to the world around me, with the world. And to go one step further, it has to be an opportunity for other human beings to see themselves reflected in these images.

Jeffrey Brown: And so, in his exhibition, a series titled The New Americans, large portraits of community workers and others making a difference, another called Since 1977, with just the tops of the heads of U.S. presidents since the time of his birth, and a painted 1953 ice cream truck, a project Valdez did with musician Ry Cooder to honor the largely Mexican-American neighborhood torn down to make room for the building of L.A.’s Dodger Stadium.

There are darker stories of the so-called Zoot Suit Riots of 1943 targeting Mexican-Americans, and a group of paintings titled The Strangest Fruit, portraying young men, including friends of Valdez, dangling in the air, his intent, he says, to restore a history, documented, but little known, of the lynchings of Mexicans and Mexican Americans.

But these men bear markers, such as clothing, of contemporary life.

Vincent Valdez: The message that a series like this conveys to the viewer, it engages the viewer in becoming more curious about, what does the past have to do with the present? Well, it is exactly this. The past is still very present in 21st century America.

Jeffrey Brown: Perhaps his most provocative work, at 38-feet-long, a gathering of Klansmen. Again, we see signs that the time is now. And, again, Valdez has grounded the image in his own experience.

Vincent Valdez: I was confronted by the Ku Klux Klan when I was 16 years old in front of the Alamo in downtown San Antonio, Texas, you know, one of them leaning over to me while carrying an American flag, peering at me through those socket holes in the hood and saying, “You don’t belong here.”

You’re forced to walk around front to back in order to see a single image at one moment.

Jeffrey Brown: Valdez wants us to feel the paintings’ size and presence. He took us to see two newer works now on display at the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, part of a large exhibition featuring many artists titled Ordinary People: Photorealism and the Work of Art since 1968.

His contribution, a kind of diptych. Michael Jordan mid-flight on one side, on the other, former National Security Council official Colonel Oliver North testifying about his role in the Iran-Contra scandal involving secret weapons transactions, two strangely parallel images from the same time, 1987-’88, that present both larger American history and Valdez’s own.

Vincent Valdez: These historic moments unfolding on my mom’s television screen as a child.

I remember trying to consider what it meant to be not only an American, but as a young Chicano, a Mexican American in South Side San Antonio, what my role, where I fit in within this context of American history. How does a scene like this unfolds here affect me in my daily life, in my community? And so it was a very dizzying effect for me.

Jeffrey Brown: Which you are recreating for us.

Vincent Valdez: Sure, exactly.

Jeffrey Brown: Also deeply personal, he says, a desire to share with others the active making art and the commitment it requires.

Vincent Valdez: In some ways, I have created this life force inside the studio that really entirely commands and dictates my life. But in this way, I try to share this kind of absolute love and devotion that I have for painting and drawing, in an age where there are short attention spans, where maybe there is — where it becomes a rarer occurrence to understand what patience and discipline really is.

Jeffrey Brown: The exhibition Just a Dream by Vincent Valdez is at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston through March 23, when it travels to MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts.

For the “PBS News Hour,” I am Jeffrey Brown.