During 2023, Vincent Valdez worked at Arion Press for six weeks for its inaugural King Artist in Residence program to present Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse-Five. For the project, Valdez created 20 original pen-and-ink drawings - many enlivened with ink washes - to bring Vonnegut’s anti-war classic roaring to contemporary relevance. Two sweeping depictions of the destruction of Dresden in 1760 and 1945 appear on the front and rear end sheets of the Arion edition. The full suite of drawings reflects Billy Pilgrim’s fractured psychological landscape as well as the external collective psychosis of a world engaged in perpetual warfare. Altogether, the body of work coalesces into what Valdez calls a “visual testimony of transformation, hope, love, and survival in 21st-century America.”