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For more than two decades, San Antonio-born artist Vincent Valdez has used painting, drawing, printmaking and sculpture to confront some of the most painful chapters of American history — including racism, violence, immigration and social injustice.
His newest exhibition turns that gaze inward.
"La Línea/The Line: Works by Vincent Valdez" opens Oct. 7 at the ACCESS Common Ground Gallery at Alamo Colleges. The exhibition brings together works spanning Valdez’s career, including pieces that explore his family history and his connection to San Antonio and South Texas.
At the center of the exhibition is a portrait based on footage of Valdez’s first breath, recorded by his father on a Super 8-millimeter camera in 1977.
For Valdez, that image became the starting point for a visual exploration of his family’s lineage.
“It's an amazing, powerful thing for me to be able to sit in the studio and watch these histories of my own family — not only of my own family, but histories of San Antonio and around Texas," he said. "You know, they travel to Laredo, they travel to Corpus Christi, Fiesta in 1954, and so I get to see the lineage of my family and beyond.”
That idea of lineage runs throughout the exhibition. The works move across different periods of Valdez’s life and artistic career, connecting personal memories with broader histories of Mexican American and Chicano communities in Texas.
The exhibition includes Valdez’s first painting, "The Ugly Duckling," from 1983, as well as a new portrait of his grandparents, Mary Louise and Arturo Valdez.
Valdez said creating the portrait required him to rely on memories from childhood — the sights, smells and sounds of his grandparents’ bedroom on San Antonio’s South Side.
“The challenge for a painting like this, painting with my eyes closed, trying to dig deep in that memory hidden somewhere in there, of what it felt like to be five years old, 10 years old, sitting in their bedroom in the South Side of San Anto, what that house felt like, what it smelled like, you know, the sounds," he said.
"And they always had this little heater, a little tin heater in their bedroom that I was always so mesmerized by as a kid because it would glow at night and it looked like this creature, you know, and it gave this real aura and atmosphere to the room.”
Remembering a history that was nearly erased
Alongside the newer work, "La Línea/The Line" includes pieces from some of Valdez’s best-known series.
One is "The Strangest Fruit," which takes its title from Billie Holiday’s 1939 protest song "Strange Fruit." The series depicts people Valdez knows against the history of lynching Latinos in Texas and elsewhere in the United States.
Valdez has said that researching the history behind the work changed his understanding of the past and shaped how he thinks about the responsibility of an artist.
“In the series ‘The Strangest Fruit’ that sense of enlightenment occurs. You know that moment of, whoa! I didn't know about this lost, erased history," he said. "I didn't know about the story that really was unfolding at first until it really jolted me like a bolt of lightning.”'
Among the historical stories represented in Valdez’s work is the death of José “Joe” Campos Torres, a 23-year-old Mexican American Army veteran who died in Houston in 1977 after being brutally beaten by Houston police officers.
Torres had been arrested for disorderly conduct at a bar in Houston’s East End. After officers took him into custody, a supervisor reportedly ordered that he be taken to a hospital because of the severity of his injuries. Instead, officers took him to a city jail. Three days later, Torres’ body was found in Buffalo Bayou.
Two officers were ultimately convicted of negligent homicide by an all-white jury and received one year of probation and a one-dollar fine. The verdict and sentence prompted outrage and protests in Houston, contributing to broader tensions between the city’s Mexican American community and police.
Torres’ death became a symbol of racial injustice in Houston and helped spur changes in police-community relations. His story is represented in works included in Valdez’s exhibition.
For Valdez, revisiting such histories is part of a larger effort to push viewers to confront stories that have been overlooked or forgotten.
“I constantly challenge myself in the studio to think as much as I possibly can about the viewer, who I'm making the work for, why I'm making it," he said. "It's my belief that as an artist, my responsibility is to try to use this work as a means to serve others in this way, critical thinking for me is top of that list.”
An artist recognized on a national stage
The exhibition comes shortly after Valdez received one of the country’s highest-profile honors for artists and scholars: the MacArthur Fellowship, commonly known as the “genius grant.”
Valdez said he was unaware the MacArthur Foundation had been following his work when he received the call informing him that he had been selected.
“It meant the world to know that they had been watching and paying attention because I've spent the last two decades almost on a weekly basis asking myself, ‘What do I need to do to get this work out into the world? What can I do further?’ And so, yeah, it's an amazing honor.”
Valdez’s work has long moved between personal experience and larger questions about American society. His paintings and drawings have addressed immigration, police brutality, feminism, racism and resistance, while drawing on Mexican American and Chicano artistic traditions.
He also works across disciplines. Valdez is a trumpet player and has collaborated with musicians and filmmakers throughout his career.
For him, art is not simply a way of documenting history. It can also be a way of challenging people to remember it.
“There's a reason, historically speaking, in regards to why the arts have always been considered threats to authoritative powers and regimes. I think that the act of critical thinking in current-day contemporary America is being challenged more so than it ever has been," he said. "The arts and the humanities remind us what it is to be human. It reminds us constantly to feel something rather than being numbed out. I create images not only as a means to tell a story, but as a way to defy the fog of social amnesia.”
"La Línea/The Line: Works by Vincent Valdez" is on display through Feb. 26, 2027, at the ACCESS Common Ground Gallery at Alamo Colleges, 2222 N. Alamo St. in San Antonio.
The exhibition traces a line from Valdez’s earliest work to his family’s history — and from those personal memories to stories of communities and people whose histories have sometimes been left out of the larger American narrative.
