Vincent Valdez excavates uncomfortable American history in thought-provoking exhibition

Texas artist Vincent Valdez was forming in his mother’s belly when Houston police officers beat a 23-year-old Mexican-American Vietnam veteran to within an inch of his life and threw him into Buffalo Bayou, where he drowned.

The 1977 killing of Jose Campos Torres was the George Floyd murder of its time. Two Houston police officers were convicted of negligent homicide, given a year’s probation and ordered to pay a one dollar fine. Angry demonstrators chanting “a Chicano’s life is worth more than a dollar!” took to the streets in protest.

It would take Houston 45 years to apologize. And 47 for Valdez to transform the story into an artistic meditation on police brutality.

Earlier this year, Valdez and his romantic-artistic partner, Adriana Corral, drove to the banks of the Buffalo Bayou to dig up shells and sediment from the river where Campos Torres drowned.

The couple infused the bayou detritus into a white gypsum statue of a Madonna, one hand slightly deformed in the casting. The bits of the bayou fracture the Madonna. An almost cherubic sketch of Campos Torres, in his Army dress uniform, is illuminated on the opposite side of the museum wall.

The homage to Campos Torres is part of an expansive and thought-provoking new retrospective by Valdez at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. The exhibition, on display until March 23, marks the first time the museum has dedicated its entire space to one artist, a sign of how important the curators see Valdez and his work.

For Valdez, who splits his time between Houston and Los Angeles,  Campos Torres’ killing was a disturbing American refrain – and a harbinger.

“Houston, Texas in 1977 is now an echo chamber, a premonition of an America racing towards a dystopic future normalizing systemic violence and oppressive practices like police brutality,” he said.

Valdez has spent his career like this, excavating America’s often overlooked past, especially parts the country often tries to bury.

His artwork has tackled police brutality, the forced removal of Mexican-Americans from their Los Angeles homes to make way for Dodger Stadium, the lynching of Mexican-Americans, and an infamous World War II-era attack by U.S. sailors on Mexican-Americans dressed in the era’s flashy, counter-cultural Zoot Suits.

Provocative history

Valdez is best known for his arresting, 30-foot-long 2016 painting of 14 modern day Ku Klux Klan members looking out of the canvas, caught in a staredown with the viewer. There are several women among the hooded figures. One hooded man holds a startled hooded infant playing with a Pikachu toy and pointing out accusingly at the watcher. Another holds an illuminated cell phone in his hand, the clearest indication the image is set in the present, not the past. 

A New York Times writer called the work “prophetic” in 2016 because Valdez began the painting a year before Donald Trump successfully tapped into white resentment during his first run for president and two years before emboldened white supremacists carrying tiki torches, chanting “you will not replace us,” marched through Charlottesville, North Carolina. A museum in Austin showing the piece posted a warning that it might “elicit strong emotions.”

Art critics called the Klan painting – titled “The City I” – provocative and controversial.  

Andrea Lepage, an Art History professor at Washington and Lee University in Virginia, said Valdez is not an artistic provocateur.

“I don’t think that it’s controversial to bring awareness to things that we should know about,” Lepage said. “Maybe what could be considered controversial is not knowing about this nation’s history.”

Actor and comedian Cheech Marin was one of the first art collectors to spot Valdez as a rising talent. In 2001, Valdez was living at home in San Antonio with his parents after graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design.

A gallery owner called Valdez and told him he had a potential collector who wanted to come see his work. Valdez was flabbergasted to open the door and see Marin, the “Nash Bridges” actor who voiced Banzai the Hyena in “The Lion King” and first gained fame in the 1970s as half of the stoner comedy duo, “Cheech and Chong.”  

Valdez took Marin into his parent’s bedroom and pulled out a rolled-up painting from under the bed. When Valdez unrolled a signature piece of his college artwork depicting the Zoot Suit riots, Marin said he had a near-spiritual experience.

“It was like finding the Dead Sea Scrolls,” Marin said, at least half in jest. “This is a different language.”

Marin bought the piece – called “Kill the Pachuco Bastard!” – and incorporated it in a touring exhibition of Chicano artwork. Some museum officials were hesitant to display the painting because it depicted a disturbing barroom brawl that includes an American sailor raping a woman on the floor.

Marin pushed back by noting that museums had no problem showing paintings by artists like Pablo Picasso, Edgar Degas, and Peter Paul Rubens depicting rape in ancient Rome. Eventually, the museums gave in.

“This is our version of the violence that was wreaked on the Chicano community,” said Marin, who opened a southern California museum in 2022 dedicated to Chicano art.

Spotlighting Campos Torres

The Contemporary Arts Museum Houston spent five years preparing for the Valdez retrospective featuring his most influential works.

The newest piece in the exhibition is the Madonna sculpture, something Valdez once hoped the city would display as part of a public tribute to Campos Torres.

Houston officials asked Valdez in 2021 to design the memorial. He drew up a proposal featuring the Madonna iconography, but ended up withdrawing from the project amid concerns the city would dilute his message. Valdez said he wanted to let the family move ahead with the city memorial planners and develop his own personal homage to Campos Torres later.

 “I made the decision to bow out because I wasn’t willing to sanitize this story,” he said. “How do we as Americans expect to move forward before acknowledging that we find ourselves facing the very same issues in our society?  These tragic events will persist until we reckon with our collective amnesia.”

Campos Torres was killed in 1977, after being arrested for disorderly conduct at a bar. Police beat the drunk, handcuffed Campos Torres so badly that a jail supervisor told the officers to take their suspect to the hospital. Instead, they took Campos Torres to a notorious dock on the Buffalo Bayou known as “The Hole.”

The officers threw Campos Torres into the water, with one officer saying: “Let’s see if the wetback can swim,” according to the city memorial along the Buffalo Bayou where the Vietnam veteran was killed. 

In 2022, Houston unveiled the tribute – which includes a towering image of Campos Torres in his Army dress uniform affixed to the side of a building near the Harris County Sheriff’s jail processing center overlooking the Buffalo Bayou.

Then-Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner said the memorial should be a

“reminder that an injustice done to one is an injustice done to all.”

“Forty five years is too late to offer an acknowledgment and an apology,” he said during the dedication ceremony. “But until it is done not only can’t the Torres family heal, not only can’t the Hispanic community move forward, but the city itself cannot heal until all of the parts that make this family together move forward.”

Valdez said he felt compelled to spotlight Campos Torres in his new exhibition because stories like his often are overlooked.

“As a Chicano, I can’t help but consider the fact that, even in the year 2024, national conversations about police violence seldomly address brown and indigenous communities in the center crosshairs of American police,” he said.

Valdez’ exploration of America’s darkest corners left him unsurprised by Trump’s re-election. In fact, he saw it as almost inevitable. 

“For far too long, America chooses to simply slap a Band-Aid over our self-inflicted injuries,” he said. “So, here we are. These wounds are now dangerously infected. It will be very difficult to expect a quick heal and call it a day in hopes that someone somewhere down the line in the next generation will cure us.”

At times like this, Valdez said, “artists really get to work.”

“Art will not solve the world’s most pressing issues,” he said. “ If I can offer a small moment of silence and clarity during moments of distraction and distortion, this is my small contribution back to the world, as a way of pushing back. Like miniature sparks of resistance that eventually over time, will spark a wildfire.”

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