Val Machado - Art, Music, and Identity
After graduating, Val completed an internship in the Department of Photographs with the Getty Center Museum and made contributions to the Queer Lens: A History of Photography exhibition (June 2025). More recently, he has returned to Berkeley and is in the process of settling into his new home and working life.
Area of Concentration Courses
American Studies 101 - The Harlem Renaissance
African American Studies 140 - Groove: Black Music Theory
History of Art 192T - Undergraduate Seminar: Black Consciousness & The Black Arts Movement: Mid-Twentieth Century Resistance Art Movements in Southern Africa and the United States
History 125B - African American History and Race Relations: 1860-2016
American Studies 101 - Classical Music and American Mass Culture Between the World Wars
Thesis
Destructions and Creations of America: Parliament-Funkadelic and the Black Arts Movement
This thesis analyzes two albums by Funkadelic, Maggot Brain (1971) and America Eats Its Young (1972), alongside selections of artwork from the Kamoinge Workshop and Emory Douglas, to demonstrate how Black musicians and artists crucially criticized and exposed American symbols of nationhood and the image America claimed to uphold during a moment of cultural transition in the late 1960s and early 1970s. At the same time, Black musicians and artists cultivated and created new conceptual frameworks of being through music and image, genres fundamentally connected to creation. Throughout the thesis, Stockley Carmichael and Charles V Hamilton’s book, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation, and essays from James Baldwin’s body of work, are used to build a theoretical framework that articulate the effects of American imperialism felt from the inside, connecting these works to provide insights from the themes found in Funkadelic’s music. At its core, this thesis is a practice of close and critical listening and looking, a lens exemplified by Baldwin throughout his work.
