Vincent Valdez: Just a Dream...

Vincent Valdez is a Houston and Los Angeles-based artist. He received a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. He was a recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant for Painters and Sculptors, and also completed residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting, the Vermont Studio Center, the Kunstlerhaus Bethania Berlin Residency, and Joan Mitchell Center. Valdez was awarded an Artadia grant and was an artist fellow at NXTHVN in New Haven.

The artist's work is included in numerous museum collections across the United States. Recent institutional exhibitions include The Face of Battle: Americans at War, 9/11 to Now, Smithsonian Museum of American Art and National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC; So Different, So Appealing, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Los Angeles, CA; The City, Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, TX; Between Play and Grief Selections from the Permanent Collection, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2019); Suffering from Realness curated by Denise Markonish Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA);and ESTAMOS BIEN: LA TRIENAL 20/21 at El Museo del Barrio, New York, NY. He is represented by Matthew Brown Gallery in Los Angeles, CA.

Evan Garza is a Curator at MASS MoCA. They were awarded the 2021-2022 IMMA Fulbright US Scholarship at the Irish Museum of Modern Art and a visiting research fellowship in History of Art and Architecture at Trinity College Dublin, where they researched Irish contemporary art, protest movements, and Ireland's anticolonial history of rebellion. Garza has organized several exhibitions and projects internationally and was artistic director of the 2021 Texas Biennial, co-curated with Ryan N. Dennis. Garza is the former director of Rice Public Art at Rice University in their native Houston, and previously was Assistant Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin. Garza was co-founder of Fire Island Artist Residency (FIAR), a New York nonprofit and the first residency program in the world exclusively for LGBTQ+ artists, where they served as assistant director until 2015. Their writing on the work of global contemporary artists has been published in several books and monographs and by Flash Art, ART PAPERS, and Artforum. Garza earned their MA from the Williams Graduate Program in the History of Art at the Clark Art Institute, and recently curated the exhibition Steve Locke: the fire next time, at MASS MoCA.

Joyce Carol Oates is a novelist, critic, playwright, poet and author of short stories and one of America’s most respected literary figures. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including We Were the Mulvaneys and Blonde. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Princeton University and a recipient of the National Book Award and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction.

Patricia Restrepo is a Curator at CAMH. She commissioned the site-specific sculptural landscape Olivia Erlanger: If Today Were Tomorrow, accompanied by a catalog with texts by Lydia Kallipoliti, Chris Kraus, and Mark von Schlegell. She co-curated Slowed and Throwed: Records of the City through Mutated Lenses, a transhistorical exhibition addressing DJ Screw's process of material manipulation, featuring artists Jamal Cyrus, Shana Hoehn, Tomashi Jackson, and Sondra Perry; and curated Will Boone: The Highway Hex, the artist's first solo museum exhibition. Restrepo explored CAMH's seventy-year history of championing performances by artists such as Laurie Anderson, James Lee Byars, Joan Jonas, Autumn Knight, and Robert Rauschenberg in Stage Environment: You Didn't Have to Be There. She coordinated the Museum's presentations of Troy Montes Michie: Rock of Eye and The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse, and has managed CAMH's artist-centric publications and their digitization. Restrepo previously worked at the Institute of Aesthetic Research (Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas) of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM).