When Vincent Valdez began painting The City, a 30ft panorama in which a dozen Ku Klux Klansmen assemble against the backdrop of a moonlit metropolis, Donald Trump had recently announced his intention to run for president. Through that fall, as Valdez toiled away in his San Antonio studio inside a 100-year old fire station, he watched Trump transform from a joke candidate into an unprecedented political sensation, often lying with impunity as he fanned the flames of racism.
Valdez was not documenting the American electorate’s embrace of white nationalism in real time, though the painting’s timing was certainly uncanny. He was merely doing what he’s always done: using the canvas to “testify”, as the artist says, “to the reality of who we are versus the myth of who we think we are”. Valdez, however, was not interested in depicting a scene of violence, as he did in The Strangest Fruit, inspired by the forgotten lynchings of Mexican American men from the late 1800s to the 1930s. Instead, he painted the klansmen with iPhones and beer cans, idling beside a cell tower and a Chevy Silverado, to presciently suggest the persistence of America’s racial fault lines.
Beginning Tuesday, The City hangs in the Blanton Museum of Art, located at the University of Texas at Austin. The piece was acquired in 2016, after the museum’s director Simone Wicha visited Valdez’s studio with her curators. Two of Valdez’s works had been shown in the Blanton before, but this piece was different, and the climate was different, too.
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