Vincent Valdez

Strangest Fruit, 2013-2014

Lithograph and digital prints

41 x 30 in (104.14 x 76.2 cm)

Framed: 44.5 x 33.5 x 1.5 in (113.03 x 85.09 x 3.81 cm)

Edition. Printer's Proof Diptych

$6,500

Valdez’s lithograph depicts one of his friends as a floating or ascending figure against a white background. The figure’s pose refers to a historical photograph of a lynching of a Latino man in Texas, little-known crimes which occurred for almost 100 hundred years from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. Accompanying the figure is a text in Spanish and English of the poem Strange Fruit by Abel Meeropol (aka Lewis Allan) written and performed in the mid-to-late 1930s, most famously by Billie Holiday, as a protest song about racism and the lynching of African Americans in the United States. Valdez changed the words to reflect his Texas context, and the owner of the piece can choose to display the text with either language right side up.

About the artist

Vincent Valdez

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), 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, MassMOca, The Museum of Fine Arts Houston, The Smithsonian Museum of American Art, and The National Portrait Gallery, among others.