John valadez artist chicano art

John Valadez (b.1951, Los Angeles, CA) is a painter, photographer, and muralist living and working in Los Angeles. As a trailblazer of the early Chicano Arts Movement in the 1970s and 80s, following the Chicano Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and 70s, his work has come to define an iconography of Chicano experience in the city by catalyzing its changing dynamics and reconstructing a mythical allegory that speaks to an alternative vision.

Valadez was active in early impactful collectives such as Los Four and Centro de Arte Publico and continues to pursue politically engaged work with a career of over 50 years championing Chicano and Latinx communities. Through his multidisciplinary practice, spanning documentary photography and portraiture, public murals, ambitiously scaled paintings, and pastel works, Valadez cultivated a style of his own that transcends genre designations.

Never settling into one box—in medium, concept, style, or theme, the t