Kathy Vargas

2024 Lifetime Achievement Award in the Visual Arts

Kathy Vargas in Conversation with Zhaira Costiniano - Sunday, October 6, Starting at 2 PM

As Kathy Vargas reflects on her remarkable decades-long career in the arts—as an artist, art administrator, mentor, activist, and curator—Light Needs Shadow Needs Light… serves as a meditation on the past, present, and future, exploring themes of life, love, and death. Through four distinct series of meticulously composed, hand-painted, silver gelatin photographs, Vargas weaves together the personal and the political, layering references to fantastical elements from her father’s Mexican folklore and her mother’s devout Catholic beliefs.

Viewers are first introduced with the installation Shopping for Bargains, an ongoing exploration of the hidden costs of consumerism, where Vargas captures the intricate details of fabrics—lace, embroidery, and patterns—juxtaposed with highly discounted price tags. This series highlights the disparity between the visible cost of fast fashion and the often unseen price paid by laborers, critiquing the illusion of bargains and the true cost of consumption. It continues with The Living Move, featuring six blurred portraits, including a self-portrait, that evoke early 20th-century portraiture with subjects seated for long periods. These images of Vargas’s loved ones, layered with thorns, flowers, fabric, and writing, symbolize the essence of life and human connection.

Installed as a monumental cross, Oración: Valentine’s Day/Day of the Dead honors those lost during the AIDS epidemic, transforming grief into art and offering a profound meditation on mortality through the act of remembrance as resurrection. Finally, Este Recuerdo serves as a tribute to Vargas’s family sacrifices and the powerful women who raised her, merging personal and political narratives into a poignant visual history that reflects on her heritage and influences.

Each photograph serves as an example of the artist’s mastery of the darkroom and photographic process. The harmonious montage of layered exposures, recurring props, brushstrokes that infuse life into the images, and calculated scratches on the negatives invite viewers to investigate the magic in the in-between.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Kathy Vargas was born and raised in San Antonio, Texas, and began photographing in 1971 under the guidance of rock and roll photographer Tom Wright. She attended San Antonio College in the mid-1970s and was mentored by painter Mel Casas, who invited her to join the Chicano art group Consafo. She received her MFA degree with a concentration in Photography from the University of Texas at San Antonio in 1984. From 1985 – 2000, she worked as the Visual Arts Program Director of the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center in San Antonio. From 2000 to 2013, she served as Chair of Art at the University of the Incarnate Word, where she is currently a Professor of Art/Photography.

Like most beginning photographers, Vargas’s first photographs were of the world closest to her. She lived (and continues to) on the East Side of San Antonio in a neighborhood that is urban and predominantly Black and Latino as well as economically distressed. So that was what she photographed; she did not go looking for the subject matter, but rather it was what was familiar and comfortable. She knew a lot of her subjects and would usually give them copies of the pictures she took of them. They were patient with her and did not mind that she took a long time to focus. So she did several series in that area: people on their front porches or in front of the homes they owned – a definite source of pride; people in the Projects, low-rent housing for single-parent families or other people having financial problems; the murals in the Projects (these mostly on the West Side of San Antonio, a predominantly Latino area; street scenes, more personal portraits, etc. 

Around 1980, her work began to change for several reasons: she felt she needed to say some things that were more personal than documentation allowed; doing the photos of people over and over had become too easy for her, not challenging enough or introspective enough, and she felt that she was photographing these people but not doing anything positive to change their lives for the better; when she left after taking her pictures noting had improved. So, while she still enjoys seeing and periodically doing documentary photography, for her, the personal statement became more important.

Partly because of her culture, partly because she is of the era that had the Vietnam war thrust in their teen years, and partly because her grandmother exposed her to the presence of death at a very young age, she has always been preoccupied with death – its finality and the impossibility of understanding it completely until we can no longer communicate what we have learned. So, a lot of her later work deals with the theme of death. “Details of Passage” is a series of cemetery mementos: headstones and flowers that deal with remembering the beloved but also forgetting, the passage of time that eases pain and also alters remembrance, etc. The Boxed Appels series also deals with that passage of time, with erosion and decay. Much of the later work is more hopeful because it deals not only with the fact of death but with the idea of transformation and eternity through eulogy and remembrance. These and later photographs also deal with the ability of photography to refer to the real world and, at the same time, create an illusion that becomes more important than reality. The double exposures play with that theme; things merge into each other, exchange identities, share features, and cross over between fantasy and reality – life and death.

She has had one-person exhibits at Sala Uno in Rome, Galeria Juan Martin in Mexico City, Centro Recoleta in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Artpace in San Antonio, Texas, and University of Houston Downtown, Houston, TX, and retrospectives at the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio, Texas and Universitat Erlangen in Germany.  Group shows include "Hospice: A Photographic Inquiry? a national traveling exhibit commissioned by the Corcoran Gallery, Washington D.C.; "Transacciones, IX Bienal Internacional de Fotografia, Canary Islands; "Foto Fest Presents" at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Russia; "Regards Croises" at Galerie Prevert, Provence, France; "Aztlan Hoy" at Canal de Isabel II, Madrid, Spain; and "Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation (CARA)" UCLA, California, USA. She received a Lightwork residency in 1993 and the Art Pace San Antonio Residency and the Art Pace London Residency in 1996-97. She was named the 2005 Texas Two-Dimensional Artist of the Year by the Texas Commission on the Arts.

In addition to curating numerous shows during her tenure at the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center, her independent curatorial projects include "American Voices: Photography by Latinos in the United States" for FotoFest 1994 (co-curated with Robert Buitron, Charles Biasiny Rivera and Ricardo Viera); "Narrative Constructs: Contemporary Trends by Women Artists of Color" and "Intimate Lives," both for Women and Their Work in Austin, Texas; "Influence" a series of three exhibits of work by Latino artists for the San Antonio Museum of Art (co-curated with Jim Edwards); "Figurative Works on Paper, the Joe Diaz Collection" for Blue Star Art Space, San Antonio; and Neil Maurer, Four Decades of Photography " for REM Gallery, San Antonio (co-curated with Larry Leissner). 

From 1993 to 2000, she was a board member of Art Matters, a New York based foundation which funded grants to individual artists. From 2003 to 2009, she was a member of San Antonio’s Public Art Commission. She was also on the City of San Antonio’s Centro de Artes Committee from 2017-2023. As of 2016, her papers have been housed in the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art.

Recent non-art activities include writing lyrics for two CDs, “Incantation” released in 2014 and “Surrealist” released in 2017 by former Blue Oyster Cult band member, Albert Bouchard.

Major funding and support for the exhibition and catalog were generously provided by the Jacques Louis Vidal Charitable Fund, Edaren Foundation, The Levant Foundation, Joe Diaz, and Wendy Watriss.