Kathy Vargas has had numerous one person exhibits including Sala Uno in Rome, Galeria Juan Martin in Mexico City, Centro Recoleta in Buenos Aires, and retrospectives at the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio and the University Erlangen in Germany. Group exhibits include “Hospice: A Photographic Inquiry” a traveling exhibit commissioned by the Corcoran Gallery, “From Media to Metaphor: Art About AIDS,” a national traveling exhibit organized by Independent Curators International, “Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation,” a national traveling exhibition organized by the Wight Gallery, and “Xican-a.o.x Body,” a national traveling exhibition organized for the Cheech Museum. She is in the collections of the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum, the Amon Carter Museum, Centro de la Imagen in Mexico D.F., the Toledo Art Museum, and Houston’s MFA as well as several private collections.
From 1984 – 86 she was an arts writer/critic for the San Antonio Light concentrating on Latino art and Photography. From 1985 – 2000 she was Visual Arts Program Director for the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center, San Antonio Texas. From 2000 to the present, she has been professor of art/photography at the University of the Incarnate Word.
She was a board member of Art Matters, a New York foundation which awarded grants to individual artists from 1993 to 2000. She has also served on San Antonio’s Public Art Commission and Centro de Artes Committee. She has curated exhibits for museums, non-profit spaces, and commercial galleries.
Named 2005 Texas Two-Dimensional Artist of the Year by the Texas Commission on the Arts, she also received San Antonio’s Medal of the Arts in 2019. She had a Lightwork Residency in 1995 and an Art Pace Residency in 1996. And in 2024 is received a Lifetime Achievement in the Visual Arts Award from the Art League Houston.
Her work is included in numerous books including Paul Matte’s Open Aperture, the Evolution of Photography in an Abstract World and Lucy Lippard’s Mixed Blessings. Her papers are housed at the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art. And as a part of her legacy as a rock and roll photographer in the 1970s, she occasionally writes lyrics for songs by her friend Albert Bouchard, former drummer for Blue Oyster Cult.
Kathy Vargas 