Ricardo Valverde's 'Solo Landing'

"He was a unique artist who shunned the confining premise of Chicano documentary photography." — Armando Durón

Written by East LA arts advocate and collector Armando Durón — who knew Valverde personally from the late 1980s and spoke at his funeral in 1998 — this is an intimate critical review of the retrospective at the Vincent Price Gallery at East Los Angeles College. Durón walks through the exhibition's thematic sections: early thesis work, self-portraits, family photographs, experimental work, Mexico/Los Angeles, and the lowrider urban scenes — charting Valverde's evolution from documentary photographer to conceptual artist.

"These are mature works that synthesize a career of reworking the obvious to suit a sensitive man's aesthetic. These aren't experimental doodles, studies or sketches."

The review positions Valverde's retrospective in a broader context: the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center monograph published the previous year, and the concurrent ASCO exhibition in Marseille, France. Durón argues that the tendency to pigeonhole Chicano artists into a single documentary mode is precisely what kept Valverde underrecognized — and that this exhibition corrects the record.

"Experience Boulevard Night (1979), an iconic image… it allows the viewer to experience the luminosity of those hot East L.A. nights, the allure of the street, the super charge of the ladies. The piece is more about the reasons for cruising than about the event itself."