Vincent Valdez's new exhibition at San Antonio's ArtPace offers 'meditation on violence'

Lynching victims, forcibly disappeared individuals and hooded monsters of the Ku Klux Klan are among the loaded subjects San Antonio-born artist Vincent Valdez tackles in his powerful drawings, paintings and prints. A decade ago, Valdez took over Artpace’s Hudson Showroom with The Strangest Fruit — an arresting exhibition of large-scale paintings exploring the oft-erased history of Mexicans and Mexican Americans lynched in Texas between the 1800s and the 1930s. The series title references “Strange Fruit,” a protest poem by Abel Meeropol set to music and popularized by Billie Holiday in 1939.