Says Vincent Valdez:
"The Strangest Fruit is a series of large paintings that is inspired
by the lost/erased history of lynched Mexicans and Mexican-Americans in
the United States from the late 1800's well into the 1930's. The title
is borrowed from the poem Strange Fruit (Abel Meripool) that was made
famous by Billie Holiday’s recording in the 1930's. The poem/song lyrics
present haunting visuals of black Americans, using the metaphor of
“strange fruit” to describe the victims who were hanged from trees.
I
adapted the lyrics and slightly altered the text to describe a Texas
landscape, which sprouts "brown bodies” instead of "black bodies.” The
title, The Strangest Fruit, suggests that this sinister portion of
American history goes much further than we have been told. The subject
of Latino lynchings is almost entirely unknown, unheard of, and unspoken
in the United States."
and
"Presenting this historical subject in a contemporary context
enables me to present the noose as metaphor and suggest that the threat
of the noose still looms. The noose has been disguised and resold to the
American public as mass incarceration and for-profit prison industries,
the endless American drug war, the war on terror, the military
industrial complex, the criminalization of poverty, broken educational
systems and biased justice systems, stop and frisk programs and racial
profiling, mass deportation and nationalism, police brutality, all of
which lend themselves to a fearful and forgetful America.
Like
the erased bodies of the past, these paintings depict present-day
individuals who face the threat of a similar fate in America, the more
that they struggle to break free, the tighter the noose will choke."
