Vincent Valdez: In Memory

Vincent Valdez blends large, representational paintings—the scale of which recall Western traditions of history painting as well as mural painting and cinema—with contemporary subject matter. Vincent Valdez: In Memory is the first book-length study of his work, which 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. Valdez states, “My aim is to incite public remembrance and to impede distorted realities that I witness, like the social amnesia that surrounds us all.” 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.

Vincent 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), the Vermont 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 Matthew Brown Los Angeles.

Denise Markonish is the senior curator and managing director of visual arts at MASS MoCA. Her exhibitions include Trenton Doyle Hancock, Mind of the Mound: Critical Mass; Nick Cave: Until; Explode Every Day: An Inquiry into the Phenomena of Wonder; Teresita Fernández: As Above So Below; Oh, Canada; Nari Ward: Sub Mirage Lignum; These Days: Elegies for Modern Times; and Badlands: New Horizons in Landscape. She edited the books Teresita Fernández: Wayfinding (DelMonico/Prestel) and Wonder: 50 Years of RISD Glass, and co-edited Sol LeWitt: 100 Views (Yale University Press). Markonish has taught at Williams College and RISD.

Roberto Tejada is the author of poetry collections that include Why the Assembly Disbanded (Fordham, 2022), Full Foreground (Arizona, 2012), Exposition Park (Wesleyan, 2010), and Mirrors for Gold (Krupskaya, 2006). His book Still Nowhere in an Empty Vastness (2019) is a Latinx poetics attuned to colonial settlements and cultural counter-conquest at the intersection of history and metaphor in art and writing of the Americas.

Praised by the New York Times for his “genuine originality,” Rufus Wainwright has established himself as one of the great male vocalists and songwriters of his generation. The New York-born, Montreal-raised singer songwriter has released seven studio albums, three DVDs, and three live albums, including the Grammy-nominated Rufus Does Judy at Carnegie Hall, which captured his celebrated Judy Garland tribute performance at the London Palladium in 2007, and the album Release The Stars which went Gold in Canada and the U.K.