Vincent Valdez via giant steps through a matrix based in the phenomenon placing most of the 7.8 billion of us within 6 or fewer degrees — steps — of each other...
- Steps from Vincent Valdez:
I'LL TAKE YOU THERE! ▶
'mātriks / "source" / from "mater", Latin for "mother". We're real mothers for ya!
I'LL TAKE YOU THERE! ▶
- Steps forward by: The Matrix via ↴
Who I Am & Where I Live
- Name: Vincent Valdez
- City: Houston, Texas
- Country: United States
- Hometown: San Antonio, Texas
My Life & Work
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Bio:
Vincent Valdez is recognized for his monumental portrayal of the contemporary figure. His drawn and painted subjects remark on a universal struggle within various socio-political arenas and eras. He states,“My aim is to incite public remembrance and to impede distorted realities that I witness, like the social amnesia that surrounds me.”
Valdez was born in 1977 in San Antonio, Texas. He received a full scholarship to study at the Rhode Island School of Design, and earned his BFA in 2000. A recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant for Painters and Sculptors (2016), as well as residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting (2005), theVermont Studio Center (2011) and the Kunstlerhaus Bethania Berlin Residency (2014).
Valdez currently lives and works in Houston.
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.
He is represented by David Shelton Gallery and Mathew Brown Los Angeles.
Contact Information
- Email: vvaldez78@gmail.com
My Media & Markets
- ▶ Instagram: vincentvaldez77
- ▶ Website: http://vincentvaldezstudio.com
- ▶ Articles: http://vincentvaldezstudio.com/press
More
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Quotes, Notes & Etc.
These subjects are framed by my personal experiences and examination of contemporary life in twenty-first century America. Distorted social realities such as economic and racial inequality, conflict, hyper-nationalism, sanctioned violence, and other systemic patterns that historically serve as prelude for democratic decay compels me to reflect on my social environment.
I am alarmed by the denial of history. I will continue to create visual counter-images to impede the social amnesia that surrounds me. Painting can’t change the world. But, it can provide critical moments of silence and clarity during times of immense distortion and chaos.
I stand firm in my belief that the artist must play a role in a rapidly changing society. It has been my life’s effort to create a visual language entirely my own, driven by a pursuit for skill, reflection and conviction. Here are my visual memorials to the experience of being human.
Clips (more may be added)
The world's artists via giant steps through a matrix based in the phenomenon placing most of the 7.8 billion of us within 6 or fewer degrees — steps — of each other ...
... a project conceived and built in the fertile, fecund and atavistic ground zero of Bahia, Brazil initially for the discoverability of this singular region's dispossessed genius. In order to work for the children of the canecutters though, the mechanism must work for everybody.
All explained in the window immediately below. Followed — beneath this window — by scores of magnificent artists, each leading to myriads more artists/categories. Inside this window also may be found our Brazilian record store radio, named by British journal The Guardian as one of 10 of the Best Radio Stations Around the World!
IF YOU CAN'T STAND THE HEAT
Brazil is not a European nation. It's not a North American nation. It's not an East Asian nation. It straddles -- jungle and desert and dense urban centers -- both the equator and the Tropic of Capricorn. It absorbed over ten times the number of African slaves taken to the United States of America, and much of its aboriginal population was absorbed into the general population-at-large. Its people have lived under oligarchy, plutocracy, dictatorships and massive corruption, with elements of these still strongly entrenched today.
But!
Brazil has buzz...not the shallow buzz of a fashionable moment...but the deep buzz of a population which in spite of -- or perhaps because of -- the tough slog through life they've been allotted by humanity's dregs-in-fine-linen, have chosen not to simply pull themselves along but to lift their voices in song and their bodies in dance...to eat well and converse well and much and to wring the joy out of the day-to-day happenings and small pleasures of life which are so often set aside or ignored in the European, North American, and East Asian nations.
For this Brazil has a genius perhaps unparalleled in all other countries and societies, a genius which thrives alongside peeling paint and holes in the streets and roads, under bad organization by the powers-that-be, both civil and governmental, under a constant rain of societal indignities...
Which is all to say that if you don't know Brazil and you're expecting any semblance of order, progress and light, you will certainly find the light! And the buzz of a people who for generations have responded to privation at many different levels by somehow rising above it all.
Raimundo Sodré, in a conversation ranging from the quilombos of Bahia to the favelas of Rio to the poorer quarters of New Orleans to the south side of Chicago to Harlem to Appalachia to Irish villages and Russian shtetls and even Mozart...put it like this:
"Where there's misery, there's music!"
So it's not just Brazil. And it's not just music.
