FreshGrass Institute invites you to immerse yourself in a 4-day drawing workshop with artist Vincent Valdez. This workshop is focused on the intersection of figurative drawing and developing concepts. Participants are asked to bring a sense of curiosity to expand your technical practice with personal, social and political concepts. 

The workshop will also include artist critiques, studio/museum visits, and shared meals provided by local purveyors. All while staying in the quiet luxury of the Porches Inn, situated in the heart of artistic North Adams, in the creative Berkshires of Western Massachusetts.

Vincent Valdez blends large, representational paintings—the scale of which recall Western traditions of history painting as well as mural painting and cinema—with contemporary subject matter. He focuses on subjects that explore his observations and experience of life in the twenty-first century. The results are powerful images of American identity that confront injustice and inequity while imbuing his subjects with empathy and humanity. Valdez states, “My aim is to incite public remembrance and to impede distorted realities that I witness, like the social amnesia that surrounds us all.”

A recipient of the Ford and Mellon Foundations Latinx Artist Fellowship (2022), Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant for Painters and Sculptors (2016), as well as residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting (2005), the Vermont Studio Center (2011), the Kunstlerhaus Bethania Berlin Residency (2014), and the Arion Press’ King Residency (2023), Valdez currently lives and works between Houston and Los Angeles. Exhibitions and Collections include: The Ford Foundation, The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, MASS MoCA, The Museum of Fine Arts Houston, The Smithsonian Museum of American Art, and The National Portrait Gallery, among others. He lives and works in Houston and Los Angeles.