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 2017, after the museum’s director Simone Wicha visited Valdez’s studio. Two of Valdez’s works had been shown in the Blanton before, but this piece was different, and the climate was different, too.

Vincent Valdez’s The City as exhibited at the David Shelton Gallery, Houston Photograph: Peter Molick Photography/The Blanton Museum of Art

College campuses, in the three years since Trump’s rise, had become epicenters of partisan debates about political correctness and free speech. The art world, meanwhile, had its share of scuffles over who-can-paint-what, most notably after the 2017 Whitney Biennial featured the white artist Dana Schutz’s painting Open Casket, a rendering of Emmett Till’s corpse that was criticized for making a spectacle of black suffering. Wicha, in preparation for the acquisition, wanted to ready Blanton and the community for the conversations the painting would inevitably spark.

“When our curators and I went to go see the painting, we were struck not just by the exceptional painterly quality and artistic integrity of the work, but also the power of it and the opportunity for dialogue,” says Wicha, who invited campus faculty and student leadership to see the piece before it was exhibited publicly. “As a university art museum, we are a key resource for the community and often the school district. So it was important to foster a positive dialogue so that we’re learning, as opposed to creating an environment that is more controversial.”

In so doing, Wicha arranged for a number of resources to augment the piece. First, its own website, where readers can find analysis of the painting by the Anti-Defamation League’s regional director and faculty from UT’s Department of African and African Diaspora Studies. There’s also a disclaimer in the gallery, warning that the piece “may elicit strong emotions”, and a comment box where visitors can share their thoughts. The opening will be followed by a series of talks and symposia addressing the painting and representations of race in art more broadly. It’s important, says Wicha, “to be clear that the intention is anti-racist”.

Vincent Valdez works on a four-panel painting of modern day klansmen in his studio in San Antonio. Photograph: Michael Stravato/The Blanton Museum of Art

Inspired by the work of Philip Guston, who frequently depicted hooded klansmen, Valdez painted with the “lineage of American artists who addressed white supremacy and racism” in mind. It’s a lineage that he, as a Mexican American, wanted to take on, but in a way that had more contemporary resonance than, say, Picasso’s Guernica or Goya’s The Third of May. “Viewers have no problem glancing at those pieces, or even a scene of a crucifixion, because it can be discounted as 500 years or a hundred years ago,” says the 40-year-old artist. “It’s harder to acknowledge the truth when it’s in our own backyard.”



Though many of its participants were dressed in army fatigues and cargo pants rather than white robes, the painting calls to mind last summer’s rally in Charlottesville, where white separatists, neo-Nazis and klansmen clashed violently with counter-protesters, killing one. “It was eerie in the sense that I started this piece with the intention of bringing light to something that hadn’t yet been spoken,” says Valdez. “But reflecting on the painting in 2018 only proves what I was trying to say: that these hoods, and the various disguises that have mutated themselves over the past few centuries, are more exposed by the day.”

But not everyone in Austin views the painting’s exhibition as occasion for discourse about racism. A UT student organized a demonstration against the piece, called Defying the KKK Mural at the Blanton Museum of Art, that, in the end, never materialized. But among their grievances is that the painting “glamourizes historical violence by way of art world validation”, and also that it was made by Valdez. “The artist is Mexican American and while Mexicans experienced racism in the Western Hemisphere, the KKK historically terrorized and murdered African Americans to a larger extent,” reads a description of the protest, which calls for the removal and destruction of the painting.

Valdez is wary of the backlash, especially as it comes from the community that suffered most at the hands of the KKK. But as he worked on the piece, he was less apprehensive about how it’d be received than he was motivated to confront a charged subject, which is the way he feels today.

“There are many art institutions that would rather turn away from the world than confront it,” he says. “I understand the outrage and the plight of my black brothers and sisters and the long, long brutal reality of overt and covert racism they’ve experienced. But my job as an artist is bring these things to light in spaces that are often sterile or safe.”