Vincent Valdez, the San Antonio-born artist who drew national attention for his monumental painting of the Ku Klux Klan a few years ago, is now the subject of a short film.
“The City,” a provocative four-part canvas in which hooded figures seem to confront the viewer, was featured in the New York Times and was acquired by the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Austin in 2016. The epic work is among the subjects covered in “Vincent Valdez: The Beginning is Near,” a short film by San Antonio-based filmmaker Ray Santisteban.
The film is part of “In the Making,” a new online series from “American Masters,” the long-running PBS arts and culture series spotlighting cutting edge contemporary artists of color making impactful work, and Firelight Media, New York-based nonprofit, which supports documentaries about communities of color made by filmmakers of color.
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When Santisteban read Firelight Media’s call for entries for the series, he knew Valdez fit the bill.
“Literally, I called Vincent five minutes later, and said, ‘This is you. You want to do it?’” Santisteban recalled.
Santisteban’s film can be seen on the “American Masters” YouTube channel, youtube.com/c/americanmasters/videos. It wraps a series of films profiling artists Damon Davis, Bunky Echo-Hawk, Anik Khan, Amyra León, Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio, Maia Cruz Palileo and Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah.
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The hope is that the series continues beyond this first run, said Loira Limbal, Firelight’s senior vice president for programs. “The goal of the series really is to lift up and celebrate all of these artists that are emerging,” she said. “Some of them are already pretty established, but I think, regardless of their career trajectory, they are not typically included in conversations about the canon of American art.”
Valdez’ richly detailed work is a powerful exploration of a range of social and political issues, making his inclusion in the series “a no-brainer,” Limbal said.
Santisteban was a no-brainer, too. The folks at Firelight got to know him and his work when he took part in the organization’s Documentary Lab, a program that supports the work of emerging filmmakers, about four years ago.
“We felt that he is equally impressive in his own right, and an artist worthy of support,” Limbal said. “And what he did with the film, it exceeded all of our expectations.”
Santisteban covers a lot of ground in the 11-minute film. It includes video of a pre-teen Valdez at work on a mural, as well as footage of him at work in his Houston studio and talking about what he does. There is a quick discussion of “The City” by Lawrence Downes, who wrote about it for The New York Times in 2016.
And musician Ry Cooder pops up, too, talking about “El Chávez Ravine,” a collaboration with Valdez dealing with the destruction of a Latino neighborhood in Los Angeles to make way for the construction of Dodger Stadium in 1959.
Those voices, and those of curators who have exhibited Valdez’ work, help place it in a larger context, Santisteban said. “You say ‘contemporary art,’ most people don’t know what it is,” he said. “I don’t know if I know clearly what it is. I wanted to make it accessible by contextualizing it.”
He spent about six months working on it, practically a blink of an eye compared to how long it took to complete the film project that preceded it. “The First Rainbow Coalition,” about the unlikely alliance formed between Black Panthers, a working-class white group known as the Young Patriots and the Latino Young Lords Organization in Chicago in 1969, premiered in January and aired on PBS’ “Independent Lens.”
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He worked on that film for about four years — time well spent as the film was nominated for the ABC News VideoSource Award given as part of the IDA Documentary Awards. Winners will be announced in a virtual ceremony Jan. 16.
His mind still returns to it from time to time — “It was so long, I’m still processing,” he said — but he also has begun a new project. The film is about the efforts of Lisa Buentello, military veterans and others to preserve the memory of her husband, Rodney Buentello, a retired Marine who drowned while saving two teenagers from the same fate at Bandera City Park in 2016.
Santisteban recently received a grant from the Austin Film Society for the project. Work has slowed a bit because of the pandemic, but he’s confident he will be able to pull the documentary together fairly swiftly.
Deborah Martin is an arts writer in the San Antonio and Bexar County area. To read more from Deborah, become a subscriber. dlmartin@express-news.net | Twitter: @DeborahMartinEN
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