Through his work across many media, Houston and Los Angeles-based artist Vincent Valdez bears witness to the world around him, chronicling an America at the margins. Vincent Valdez: Just a Dream... features work from over twenty years and writings addressing Valdez's work through the lens of politics, history and humanity. Valdez's approach to imaging his country, its people, politics, pride, and foibles includes boxing, lynchings of Mexican Americans, border walls, politics, greed, the Ku Klux Klan, and the failings and triumphs of American society. Vincent Valdez: Just a Dream... accompanies survey exhibitions of his work by the same name at the Contemporary Art Museum of Houston (CAMH) in 2024-5 and MASS MoCA in 2025-6. The bilingual (English/Spanish) publication features both full-color works and a gatefold for The Strangest Fruit as well as a sewn-in booklet of behind-the-scenes studio images. Texts include a reprint of Joyce Carol Oates' On Boxing, essays by exhibition co-curators Denise Markonish and Patricia Restrepo; and a text by Evan Garza on the artist's relationship to Texas.
Garza, Evan: -
Evan Garza is a Curator at MASS MoCA. They were awarded the 2021-2022 IMMA Fulbright US Scholarship at the Irish Museum of Modern Art and a visiting research fellowship in History of Art and Architecture at Trinity College Dublin, where they researched Irish contemporary art, protest movements, and Ireland's anticolonial history of rebellion. Garza has organized several exhibitions and projects internationally and was artistic director of the 2021 Texas Biennial, co-curated with Ryan N. Dennis. Garza is the former director of Rice Public Art at Rice University in their native Houston, and previously was Assistant Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin. Garza was co-founder of Fire Island Artist Residency (FIAR), a New York nonprofit and the first residency program in the world exclusively for LGBTQ+ artists, where they served as assistant director until 2015. Their writing on the work of global contemporary artists has been published in several books and monographs and by Flash Art, ART PAPERS, and Artforum. Garza earned their MA from the Williams Graduate Program in the History of Art at the Clark Art Institute, and recently curated the exhibition Steve Locke: the fire next time, at MASS MoCA.
Markonish, Denise: -
Denise Markonish is the Chief Curator at MASS MoCA. Her exhibitions include Jeffrey Gibson: POWER FULL BECAUSE WE'RE DIFFERENT; Joseph Grigely: In What Way Wham?; Amy Yoes: Hot Corners; Marc Swanson: A Memorial to Ice at the Dead Dear Disco (MASS MoCA and Thomas Cole National Historic Site, Catskill, NY); Lily Cox-Richard: Weep Holes; Amy Hauft: Terra, Luna, + Sol; Glenn Kaino: In the Light of a Shadow; Suffering from Realness; Trenton Doyle Hancock, Mind of the Mound: Critical Mass; Nick Cave: Until (co-organizers Carriageworks, Sydney, Australia, and The Momentary, Bentonville, AK; traveled to Tramway, Glasgow, Scotland); Explode Every Day: An Inquiry into the Phenomena of Wonder; Teresita Fernández: As Above So Below; Oh, Canada (traveled to Alberta, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island); Nari Ward: Sub Mirage Lignum; These Days: Elegies for Modern Times; and Badlands: New Horizons in Landscape. She has worked on long-term projects with Laurie Anderson and has commissioned works by Sarah Oppenheimer, Stephen Vitiello, Julianne Swartz, Mark Dion, and many others. Markonish has produced numerous exhibition catalogs and has guest edited the books Teresita Fernández: Wayfinding (DelMonico) and Wonder: 50 Years of RISD Glass, and co-edited Sol LeWitt: 100 Views (Yale University Press). She has taught at Williams College and the Rhode Island School of Design, was a visiting curator at Artpace, San Antonio, and Haystack School of Craft, Deer Isle, Maine.
Oates, Joyce Carol: -
Joyce Carol Oates has published more than seventy books of fiction, poetry, and essays. Her novels include Night. Sleep. Death. The Stars.; The Book of American Martyrs; The Accursed; The Gravedigger's Daughter; Blonde; We Were the Mulvaneys; Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart; You Must Remember This; Bellefleur; and them. She is also the author of the story collections Beautiful Days and Dis mem ber. She has been a professor at Princeton University since 1978, and was the founding editor of The Ontario Review. She has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize multiple times, received the National Book Award for them (1969) and for Blonde (2000), and received the National Humanities Medal in 2010 for her lifetime achievement in literature.
Restrepo, Patricia: -
Patricia Restrepo is a Curator at CAMH. She commissioned the site-specific sculptural landscape Olivia Erlanger: If Today Were Tomorrow, accompanied by a catalog with texts by Lydia Kallipoliti, Chris Kraus, and Mark von Schlegell. She co-curated Slowed and Throwed: Records of the City through Mutated Lenses, a transhistorical exhibition addressing DJ Screw's process of material manipulation, featuring artists Jamal Cyrus, Shana Hoehn, Tomashi Jackson, and Sondra Perry; and curated Will Boone: The Highway Hex, the artist's first solo museum exhibition. Restrepo explored CAMH's seventy-year history of championing performances by artists such as Laurie Anderson, James Lee Byars, Joan Jonas, Autumn Knight, and Robert Rauschenberg in Stage Environment: You Didn't Have to Be There. She coordinated the Museum's presentations of Troy Montes Michie: Rock of Eye and The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse, and has managed CAMH's artist-centric publications and their digitization. Restrepo previously worked at the Institute of Aesthetic Research (Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas) of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM).
Valdez, Vincent: -
Vincent Valdez is a Houston and Los Angeles-based artist. He received a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. He was a recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant for Painters and Sculptors, and also completed residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting, the Vermont Studio Center, the Kunstlerhaus Bethania Berlin Residency, and Joan Mitchell Center. Valdez was awarded an Artadia grant and was an artist fellow at NXTHVN in New Haven.
The artist's work is included in numerous museum collections across the United States. Recent institutional exhibitions include The Face of Battle: Americans at War, 9/11 to Now, Smithsonian Museum of American Art and National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC; So Different, So Appealing, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Los Angeles, CA; The City, Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, TX; Between Play and Grief Selections from the Permanent Collection, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2019); Suffering from Realness curated by Denise Markonish Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA);and ESTAMOS BIEN: LA TRIENAL 20/21 at El Museo del Barrio, New York, NY. He is represented by Matthew Brown Gallery in Los Angeles, CA.
