NORTH ADAMS — The impact is abrupt, stark: Barely across the threshold at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, a shadowy 30-foot-long painting of a gang of white-hooded klansmen clustered in the headlight glare of a jacked-up pickup truck comes into sharp view. It would be jarring at any moment, an unabashed visual confrontation with the history of American racial conflict at its most viscerally grim. But in this one, it hit me with particular force.
In recent days, an American president has derided an entire community of African immigrants as “garbage,” live on national TV; he doubled down just a few days later, calling their home country a “shithole” at a public rally; meanwhile, federal immigration agents across the country have for months been using brute force to arrest migrants in neighborhoods of overwhelmingly non-white immigrants, hustling them away in unmarked vehicles. And as recent events reminded us, antisemitism is surging, here and abroad. Forget about America’s past, for a moment; it feels almost like you’ve walked into a vision of its very-near future.
But Vincent Valdez, the artist responsible for that vision, would surely shrug off any notion of the piece being timely. Born and raised in San Antonio, Valdez, 48, is fond of a quote from the great American novelist Gore Vidal: “We are the United States of Amnesia. We learn nothing because we remember nothing.” The themes of his work have been unchanged for more than two decades. And the conflict at its heart, surely at apex in that broad, stark image of racial terror, is not timely, or topical, or of-the-moment; whatever its ebb and flow, it simply is. And as little as any of us feel like we need a reminder, confronted as we are with the ugly reality of intolerance day by day, Valdez offers the long view.
The painting, titled “The Beginning is Near, An American Trilogy, Ch. 1: The City II,” 2016, is a clear centerpiece of “Just a Dream…,” Valdez’s 25-year career survey at Mass MOCA until spring. Not that it’s only Chapter 1; the piece is an invitation to a broader and more nuanced narrative than it offers on its own. Whatever shock it offers, there is depth and subtlety to be found across Valdez’s virtuosic oeuvre, brimming with humanity and grace.
Above all, I think, Valdez insists that the largely unseen be seen, and not in the ad hoc horror show of hurried phone footage of brutal arrests and detainments that flood social media feeds every single day. They do their work, helping to transform in the public eye a statistical daily-news datapoint into the rough, inhuman practice it is. Valdez, in his way, completes the picture. Beyond the immediate shock, Valdez humanizes, deepens, and presents recent immigrants with nobility and grace.
A selection of life-size portraits from his recent series “The Beginning is Near: An American Trilogy, Ch. 3: The New Americans,” provides an understated but powerful counterpoint to the exhibition’s incipient shock. “Juan Cartegena,” 2021, portrays a balding middle-aged man in an urban alleyway. He wears a suit, his fingers are interlocked, and a graying fringe of neatly-trimmed beard and hair frame an expression of stoic, serene determination. “Mr. Checkpoint,” 2021, captures a young man with a skateboard at an intersection; a police car wails past, but he’s unperturbed. Both project an air of contemplative grace, a getting-on-with-it stance that fastens the immigrant experience to the quotidian normalcy most of us aspire to.
This, of course, is “Chapter 3” for a reason. “The Beginning is Near: An American Trilogy, Ch. 1: The City” is the title of the painting of those klansmen, as grim a starting point to Valdez’s tale as you could imagine. Look closely: The crowd includes women, and a wide-eyed infant in a tiny hood and robe. There’s an echo here of Philip Guston’s infamous series of klansmen in mundane everyday chores — at the office, standing in line, or cruising aimlessly in a car through city streets. It was an unnerving portrait of the banality of evil — and of how hatred has festered not in full-throated rallies in the dead of night but woven through everyday America at its most otherwise normal.
But in the broader arc of Valdez’s intent, it’s not impossible to read it as the scorched earth that allows hope to grow. Chapter 2, “Dream Baby Dream,” doesn’t inspire optimism either. A grid of portraits rendered in inky black and silver tones of a spectrum of figures — a woman in a hijab, a trio of Native American men, a pair of Tibetan monks, a wizened rabbi — speaking at a podium wreathed in flowers; it has the unmistakable sense of a funeral.
Made in 2018, amid the shock of vast social regression gripping the nation during Trump’s first term, you can read the piece as a requiem. In one frame, the stripes of the American flag dangle in the ombre, alone. The dream, clearly, is the American archetype: of the limitless possibility of anyone from anywhere making the life they want here, then, as now, dangling by a thread. A painting of a black wreath, hung apart, makes space for renewal. “It’s the dream that keeps,” reads gothic script strung along a ribbon that binds it. It’s a reminder, at least to me, that America has found itself in darkness before, and made its way to the light.
It was, in this moment, heavy with emotion, something I needed to see. One thing to understand about the exhibition: It is very much about seeing, almost entirely unencumbered with blocks of explanatory text and didactics, except for very practical purpose. I have to think this was Valdez’s doing as much as the work itself, making “Just a Dream…” as open a read as you’ll find. (If you dig deeper, you’ll learn “Dream Baby Dream” is in fact a depiction of the funeral of Muhammed Ali, but I’d almost rather not know; its lament is, and should — be, broader, whatever the impacts of Ali’s tireless war against injustice.) What you bring to it bears mightily on what you’ll get out of it. You might learn more about yourself than anything else, and there’s no greater purpose for art than that.
Even so, Valdez is hardly hands off, and he makes clear that any path, whether to darkness or enlightenment, is hardly straight. “The Strangest Fruit,” a series of 2013 full-length portraits of young men on stark white backgrounds as though in midair, has the obvious echo of the Billie Holiday tune about southern lynchings in the 1930s; a small sculptural piece recreates the front page of the Los Angeles Times in 1992, when the acquittal of the officers charged with beating Rodney King sparked widespread riots. “Bush Ordering Troops to L.A.,” the black line head, is heavy with foreshadows of the here and now.
And the most blunt piece here, “The Hole/In Memory (For Joe Campos Torres),” 2024, extracts a horror of racial injustice from Texas history: In 1977, Torres, a veteran, was arrested and then taken to Buffalo Bayou, where he was beaten and drowned by the arresting officers. In 2021, the Houston police department finally acknowledged and apologized for the murder. The piece pairs a portrait of Torres in military dress uniform by Valdez with a statue of the Virgin Mary by Adriana Corral, cast from the clay of Buffalo Bayou.
You get the idea. Valdez leans easily into activist territory, and doesn’t hesitate to use his ample gifts in blunt and righteous fashion. And they are ample. Don’t miss, because how could you, the fact that Valdez is an extraordinary painter. His old master-worthy images in “Dream Baby Dream” are particularly disarming; the furious seas of “Godspeed,” 2019, of a tall ship struggling against a surge of rogue waves in a steel-gray ocean, is extraordinary.
But Valdez is also a reminder that, throughout history, some of the most powerful art has been the product of the worst circumstances. Recently in Madrid, I was able to stand in front of Picasso’s “Guernica,” his 1939 epic lament for the carnage of the onset of Spanish fascism, a convulsion of violent inhumanity at its most extreme. An eruption of grief at the wholesale bombing of the town of Guernica by Franco-allied Nazi forces, it’s perhaps his most powerful work.
Valdez less favors grand individual gestures than a long view. His work reads as a steady accretion of oppression interwoven with the occasional triumph of resistance and justice. In 2005, Valdez teamed up with the musician Ry Cooder to make “El Chavez Ravine,” a 1953 Good Humor ice cream truck that Valdez emblazoned with an epic narrative oil painting that captured the story of the forcible eviction of the Mexican American community in El Chavez to make way for the construction of Dodger Stadium (Cooder made an album, “Chavez Ravine,” about the story). A real world emblem of innocent youth festooned with a shameful chapter of gentrification, discrimination, and displacement — all elements in urban America right now, suffering the worst housing crisis maybe in its history — it coalesces Valdez’s long view, where art and activism meet. It all adds up, and Valdez is profoundly invested in the tally.
VINCENT VALDEZ: JUST A DREAM...
Through April 5. Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, 1040 Mass MoCA Way, North Adams. 413-662-2111, www.massmoca.org
Murray Whyte can be reached at murray.whyte@globe.com.