Whenever Victor Van completes an artwork, he exclaims, “I won!”
Visit Van in the studio at the Interact Center in St. Paul, where the prolific artist is surrounded by stacks of his recent paintings and an archive of handmade books and drawings, and it becomes clear: Van wins a lot.
The work is dense, maximalist and playful, with references to pop culture, architecture and urban life, advertising, art history, current events and food and drink. With his books, Van paints and draws KFC meals and Disney characters bumping up against fizzy cocktails and luxury cars, packed in by his tiny, neat scrawl, documenting songs on the radio and other ephemera.
For a decade, Van has worked with Interact, an arts nonprofit that supports contemporary artists living with disabilities. Van recently became the first Interact artist in the center’s 30-year history to have work acquired by the Walker Art Center.
“It’s so incredible!” Van says.
The Walker Art Center, an internationally recognized contemporary art institution in Minneapolis, recently purchased two artist books by Van, “KS95 Best Variety Songs 2013-2014” and the four-part series “Maria Valentina and the Mr. Piper Collection.”
“What struck me, foremost, is just their overall exuberance,” says Meg Black, the head of library and archives at the Walker. “They're visually engaging works using bright colors and expressive lines, and then the content is a surprising combination of words and images sourced from popular culture and the mass media.”
Black adds, “That paradox of the handmade and the mass produced, I just found really incredibly moving and inspiring.”
Van’s artworks will join the Walker Art Center Library’s Rosemary Furtak Collection of about 2,000 artist books, alongside works by Sol Lewitt, Sky Hopinka, Kara Walker and Glen Ligon.
“I’m really proud of him. He deserved it,” says Yawa Vanthanouvong, Van’s mother. “I watch him doing it and I know every piece is precious. It's really good.”
Vanthanouvong says he’s been creating art since the age of 8, around the same age when he learned how to book-bind by hand from his homeroom teacher Dee Lundell at the Ramsey School in Minneapolis.
“I do hand binding,” says Van, nodding. “KS95 Best Variety Songs 2013-2014” and “Maria Valentina and the Mr. Piper Collection” took 10 and 16 years, respectively, to complete, he says.
Wearing protective white gloves, Van’s Interact advocate Jonas Specktor pages through the KS95 book.
“So this is Jan. 19, 2014, and it has Stevie Wonder, ‘Don't You Worry 'Bout a Thing,’” Specktor says.
Specktor points to all the data points Van has captured below: the year the song was released, the day the “Innervisions” album was released, the song lyrics, the length of the album version versus the single version and the record label. Squeezed between the handwriting are illustrations of Seagram’s Vodka and a Popeyes bag of food. This is all on one tiny page; Van’s book is an encyclopedic record.
“I'm continuously surprised by not just the level of quality of his work and the considerable volume of work he's making,” Spektor says, “but also his perspective on things. There's a lot of surprise within — what he's documenting. Obviously Victor has a love of movies, music, TV, pop culture in general; but then also geography, landscape, history — all this comes up.”
With “Maria Valentina and the Mr. Piper Collection,” Van has adapted a 1960s Canadian children’s television series using found paper for the covers, a common practice for the artist.
Van points to the tan binding on all four books in the series. It’s made from the paper that wraps around cigarette filters, Van says. That’s one of the reasons that out of all his artist books, this one is his favorite. Soon, Van says, he will visit it at the Walker.
Van’s winning streak continues in New York. “Great Expectations,” Van’s debut solo show, opened March 19 at the Open Studio gallery.
