John M. Valadez

John M. Valadez (born in 1951, Los Angeles, California) is a Chicano artist living in Los Angeles known for photorealistic, dreamlike paintings and pastels. He is also a muralist and a photographer. Valadez has exhibited widely, and his work is in many national and international collections.

Valadez says painting is "like being a writer." His goal is "to make little cinematic moments. Like stills of a movie. Because we’re all trying to find transcendence... That’s what really interests me."

Early life Valadez was born in 1951 at Los Angeles General Hospital, when his mother was 17 and his father was 19. He grew up in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles. After his younger brother was born, his parents separated.

Education Valadez attended the East Los Angeles Junior College for two years, where he was active in a theater group. He performed at the Mexican American Center for Creative Arts (MACCA), and he also studied art history and art practice.

Valadez recalls: "I was very fortunate to have Roberto Chavez. Chavez was the first Chicano art teacher... I didn’t have any aspirations other than to draw better and learn how to paint. A lot of my friends were much better at drawing... The ones who struggle, we’re the ones that keep at it. If it comes too easy you want to do something else." Valadez also remembers going to LACMA, where he saw "Warhol, Agnes Martin, Kienholz. I was like 17, 18. I went to the Film-X Film Festival. I saw the premiere of Eraserhead. Gronk was there."

Valadez cofounded the Public Arts Center in Highland Park in the 1970s. Valadez came to realize that murals were "temporary." His photography served as a basis for his highly detailed paintings and pastels. Valadez depicted ordinary, working-class people in Los Angeles.

Valadez's Broadway Mural (1981, Peter Norton Foundation), an 8' X 60' foot mural, was formerly displayed on the first floor of the Victor Clothing Company building at 240 Broadway. One of the artist's best known works, it has been termed "his magnum opus."

Florencia Bazzano-Nelson says Valadez, in his Broadway Mural, "deploys a cinematic overview of a diverse slice of humanity, including the many people who found their way to this busy avenue: businessmen, gang members, elderly shoppers, folk dancers, movie-goers, and inquisitive children. Such crowded scenes were not uncommon on this street."

Broadway Mural was purchased by collector Peter Norton in 1981, when the unprofitable store closed down. His plan was to keep the mural's panels intact. The mural is now on loan to the RAND corporation in Santa Monica. Before Ramiro Salcedo arranged the sale of the Victor Clothing building in 2004, he donated several artworks in the store to MALDEF in 2002, including Valadez’s The Top Hat Bridal Mural.

In his 1989 pastel Two Vendors, Valadez "captures in photographic detail another fascinating view tying Latinos to Broadway's commercial and cultural ventures. Here two men compete for the attention of female shoppers on a sidewalk." As Jonathan Yorba points out, Valadez did not witness the two young men operating a business. Rather, they had passed each other on the street, and Valadez placed them in this situation. Bazzano-Nelson notes the reference to Gianlorenzo Bernini's sculpture Saint Teresa in Ecstasy in the ecstatic female heads at the top of the pastel. She calls this pastel a baroque matrix of minute details, textural differences, and bold colors.

Twelve of Valadez's early photographs have been purchased by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

Three of Valadez's pastels were featured in the exhibition Ordinary People: Photorealism and the Work of Art since 1968 at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, in 2024-25. White Roses, 1984, pastel on paper, 59.5 x 41.75.” Revelations, 1991, 50 1/2 x 61, pastel on paper.

Mexican Museum, San Francisco, CA

Musee d’ Aquitaine, Bordeaux, France

New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, NM

Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, Logan Utah

Santa Monica Museum of Art, Santa Monica, CA

Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.

1999 Art in Public Places Award, The Architecture Foundation of Orange County Federal Office Building and Courthouse, Santa Ana, CA

1996 General Service Administration (Design) Award, El Paso Federal Building

1994 Getty Fellowship Award, California Community Arts Foundation

1987 Artist in Residence, Foundation d’Art de la Napoule, France

Books and Catalogs Bazzano-Nelson, Florencia, in E. Carmen Ramos, ed. (2014). Our America: The Latino Presence in American Art. Washington, DC, London: Smithsonian American Art Museum; D Giles Limited, pp. 330–33.

Cordova, Ruben C. (2004). ¡Arte Caliente! Selections from the Joe A. Diaz Collection. Corpus Christi, TX: South Texas Institute for the Arts, pp. 36–37.

Goldman, Shifra M., and Chon A. Noriega. (2015). Tradition and Transformation: Chicana/o Art from the 1970s through the 1990s. edited by C. Villaseñor Black. Los Angeles: UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center.

Griswold del Castillo, Richard, Teresa McKenna, and Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano, eds. (1991). Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation, 1965-1985. Los Angeles: Wight Art Gallery, University of California, Los Angeles.

Keller, Gary D., Mary Erickson, Pat Villeneuve, Melanie Magisos, Craig Smith, and Mesa Southwest Museum. (2004). Chicano Art for Our Millennium: Collected Works from the Arizona State University Community. Tempe, Ariz.: Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingüe.

Marin, Cheech, Max Benavidez, Constance Cortez, and Terecita Romo. (2002). Chicano Visions: American Painters on the Verge. Boston: Little, Brown and Co, pp. 126–133.

Scorza, Cris, Cheech Marin, Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, Riverside Art Museum, Philbrook Museum of Art, and University of Wyoming Art Museum. (2016). Papel Chicano Dos : Works on Paper from the Collection of Cheech Marin.

The Santa Anna Condition: John Valadez. (2012). San Diego: Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego.

Yorba, Jonathan, and Smithsonian American Art Museum. 2001. Arte Latino: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum. New York, [Washington, D.C.]: Watson-Guptill Publications; Smithsonian American Art Museum, pp. 102–3.