Large-scale painting of Klan members unveiled at UT
AUSTIN -- While he was working at a San Antonio movie theater as a youth, Vincent Valdez stepped outside into the abrupt chaos of protesters and counterprotesters in Alamo Plaza. That was when he came face to face with a grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, hooded but unmasked.
“We stared at each other for what seemed like minutes,” artist Valdez told Maria Hinojosa, host of National Public Radio’s “Latino USA,” along with a full auditorium of rapt listeners, at the University of Texas on Tuesday. “It was probably only a few seconds.”
UT’s Blanton Museum of Art knew it had a potential artistic bombshell in hand long before Tuesday, when it unveiled Valdez’s alarming 30-foot, four-panel painting “The City I,” a monochromatic treatment of modern-day Klan members pictured on the ragged edge of a city. So museum leaders say they spent the better part of the past year generating a quiet dialogue on depictions and interpretations of race and racism.
The panoramic “The City I” and the smaller but closely related painting “The City II,” known together as “The City,” were acquired by the university’s museum after director Simone Wicha spent years studying and admiring the San Antonio-born, Houston-based artist’s hyper-realistic canvases.
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“The City I” portrays a hooded group, including an infant, not acting in rage or violence but looking directly at the viewer as an otherwise ordinary family unit gathered under a cell tower illuminated by headlights and dim moonlight. Rodolfo Gonzalez for American-Statesman
