Artist-led walkthrough of Ordinary People with Vincent Valdez 
MOCA Grand Ave
Sunday, February 9, 2025
1 pm
Free with RSVP

Join artist Vincent Valdez for a walkthrough of Ordinary People: Photorealism and the Work of Art since 1968.

The first large-scale exhibition to reexamine the postwar art movement of photorealism and trace its lineages in art of the present day, Ordinary People includes more than forty artists (largely though not exclusively North American), spans the 1960s to the present, and features paintings alongside drawings, sculptures, and archival materials. This historical, scholarly, group exhibition recovers the social art history of photorealism and complicates its meaning as a realism.

Vincent Valdez blends large, representational paintings—the scale of which recall Western traditions of history painting as well as mural painting and cinema—with contemporary subject matter. He focuses on subjects that explore his observations and experience of life in the twenty-first century. The results are powerful images of American identity that confront injustice and inequity while imbuing his subjects with empathy and humanity. Valdez states, “My aim is to incite public remembrance and to impede distorted realities that I witness, like the social amnesia that surrounds us all.” A recipient of the Ford and Mellon Foundations Latinx Artist Fellowship (2022), 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), the Kunstlerhaus Bethania Berlin Residency (2014), and the Arion Press’ King Residency (2023), Valdez currently lives and works between Houston and Los Angeles. Exhibitions and Collections include: The Ford Foundation, The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, MASS MoCA, The Museum of Fine Arts Houston, The Smithsonian Museum of American Art, and The National Portrait Gallery, among others. He lives and works in Houston and Los Angeles.