One Fine Show: ‘Vincent Valdez, Just a Dream…’ at MASS MoCA

Welcome to One Fine Show, where Observer highlights a recently opened exhibition at a museum not in New York City, a place we know and love that already receives plenty of attention.

Full disclosure: I once worked with a museum showing a piece by Vincent Valdez (b. 1977) that was the subject of much hypothetical controversy. This was during a time in which well-meaning people adopted the position that all art should become propaganda to instill moral or at least liberal values in society’s dumbest members. One wonders how often those people visit museums, but art in those years was judged by the effect it would have on said cretins. So we had to take pains to make sure that people knew that the Mexican American Valdez did not like or endorse the Ku Klux Klan, even though he had depicted them.

It’s unlikely that anyone will be confused about Valdez’s politics should they go to see “Just a Dream…,” his first ever survey, recently opened at MASS MoCA. Valdez works big and loud, with many of his mural-sized works done in charcoal where the shades of gray are only literal. The exhibition shows work from the last 25 years, which have been hard on all of us, and his depictions of riot cops and Oliver North are even uglier than they are in real life.

Valdez tries to document, not glorify, subjects like the KKK. He is said to be inspired by a quote from Gore Vidal: “We are the United States of Amnesia, we learn nothing because we remember nothing.” One work made while Valdez was still at the Rhode Island School of Design is Kill the Pachuco Bastard! (2001), which depicts via cartoonish gore the 1943 Zoot Suit Riot, fought between a group of East Los Angeles Latinos and American servicemen. This event is not often taught but the work is unforgettable—the actor Cheech Marin bought it shortly after it was made.

“Just a Dream…” collects Valdez’s Stations series from 2001 to 2004, which depicts the last fight of a boxer in the style of the stations of the cross. I particularly enjoy the title of the last one, which keeps the fighter’s ruined face in the shadows as feet rush to tend to him: Stations: A Fine Performance by Our Winning Fighter Tonight (2001–2004)

The painting of North, It Was A Very Good Year (1987) (2024), emerges from a series that shares the work’s title and seeks to depict major events in history and the artist’s own life. Valdez catches North as he’s about to testify before Congress about Iran-Contra. It’s photorealistic, but everything boasts an eerie blue halo, North included. Don’t certain events feel that way in your own head? Another painting from this series shows Michael Jordan in 1988, midair in a slam dunk competition. North may have defied Congress but Jordan seems to defy time itself.

“Vincent Valdez: Just a Dream…” is on view at MASS MoCA through April 5, 2026.

More exhibition reviews

• On View Now: America’s Evolving Identity at the Whitney

• Shaping Air and Space: Ruth Asawa at SFMOMA

• At Kunstmuseum Basel, Medardo Rosso’s Radical Dismantling of Form

• Hauser & Wirth Spotlights Luchita Hurtado’s Underrecognized Geometric Word Paintings

• Ali Cherri Honors Life, Loss and Defiance in ‘How I Am Monument’

• In Menorca, Cindy Sherman’s Cinematic Take on Womanhood