Africanamerican Photographer San Antonio Museum of Art Strange Fruit
The Strangest Fruit
Vincent Valdez
Exhibition: May viii – Aug 31, 2014
- Summertime 2014
- Hudson Showroom
The Strangest Fruit is a serial of big paintings that is inspired by the lost/erased history of lynched Mexicans and Mexican-Americans in the state of Texas from the late 1800's well into the 1930'southward. The championship is taken from the poem Strange Fruit (Abel Meripool) that was made famous by Billie Holiday'southward recording in the 1930'south. The poem/song lyrics nowadays haunting visuals of black Americans, using the metaphor of "strange fruit" to describe the victims who were hanged from trees.
I adjusted the lyrics and slightly altered the text to describe a Texas landscape, which sprouts "dark-brown bodies" instead of "black bodies." The title, The Strangest Fruit, suggests that this sinister portion of American history goes much farther than we have been told. The subject of Latino lynchings is nigh entirely unknown, unheard, and unspoken of in the United states of america.
Although this subject is inspired by a specific history, I was more concerned with identifying and creating images that speak of the nowadays. These portraits draw the distorted bodies of contemporary young chocolate-brown males, distinguished by their wearable, hairstyles, peel color, sneakers, age, etc. All of these specific "markers" tend to lead to a hysteria that targets and stereotypes the bodies of young minority males in American society. At first glance, the painted bodies appear to dangle on the canvas. They can too be interpreted every bit levitated figures, defenseless somewhere in between life and expiry, reality and illusion, remembrance and erasure, heaven and hell. They float against an entirely blank background, struggling to remain in focus and straining to exist. They take no history or foundation, no story to exist told, no voice to be heard.
Presenting this historical subject in a gimmicky context enables me to present the noose as a metaphor and to suggest that the threat of the noose even so looms over the heads of the young Latino male in American guild. The punishment and fate of the noose has been disguised and resold to the American public only notwithstanding carries the weight of its harsh justice to a asymmetric number of minority American males. Institutions and methods such as: mass incarceration and for- profit prison industries, the endless American drug war along with its legal complexities and hypocracies, the war on terror, the armed forces industrial complex, the criminalization of poverty, broken educational systems and biased justice systems, stop and frisk programs and public credence of racial profiling, mass deportation and non citizen hysteria, police brutality and oppression, a racially divided and unbalanced media, etc, all lend themselves to a fearful and forgetful American future.
Similar the erased bodies of the past, these nowadays-day individuals face the threat of a similar fate in America, the more that they struggle to truly suspension costless, the tighter the noose will choke.
Artist
Vincent Valdez
San Antonio, Texas, USA
Built-in 1977, San Antonio, Texas
Valdez grew upward in San Antonio, TX and demonstrated talent for drawing at an early age. He received a full scholarship to The Rhode Island Schoolhouse of Design where he earned his BFA in 2000. In 2004 at age 26, Stations, Valdez'southward suite of monumental charcoal drawings, was shown at the McNay Museum in Texas. He was the youngest artist to accept a solo exhibition at the McNay. Exhibition venues include: The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Snite Museum of Fine art, The Frye Museum, The Mexican Museum of National Art Chicago, The Parsons Museum in Paris, The Smithsonian Museum of American Fine art, OSDE Buenos Aires, The Laguna Art Museum, The Bong Gallery at Dark-brown University and others. A recipient of the Skowhegan Schoolhouse of Painting '05 and The Vermont Studio Middle '11, and the Kunstlerhaus Bethania Berlin Residency 'xiv, Vincent currently resides and works in Firestation #15, his restored 1928 Firestation San Antonio, TX.
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Artpace is generously supported by: National Endowment for the Arts, Texas Commission on the Arts, Linda Pace Foundation, San Antonio Department of Arts & Civilisation, The Brown Foundation, Inc., The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and more…
Artpace is generously supported past: National Endowment for the Arts, Texas Commission on the Arts, Linda Step Foundation, San Antonio Department of Arts & Civilisation, The Dark-brown Foundation, Inc., The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and more…
Source: https://artpace.org/exhibitions/the-strangest-fruit/
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