I create images as instruments to probe the past in order to reveal an immediacy to what is occurring today. To remark on a universal struggle within various socio-political arenas and eras. I am alarmed by the denial of history. I will continue to create counter-images, to impede the social amnesia that incites our fateful desire to repeat it. I offer this work as a report—-my visual testimony about a struggle for transformation, hope, love and survival in twenty-first century America. 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. He is represented by David Shelton Gallery and Mathew Brown Los Angeles.