Alamo Faculties District introduced its first ever artist-in-residence for the 2025-26 tutorial 12 months: San Antonio native Vincent Valdez.
Valdez is a nationally and internationally acknowledged artist whose work and murals have landed him exhibitions at The Los Angeles County Museum of Artwork, The Massachusetts Museum of Modern Artwork and The Nationwide Portrait Gallery, amongst others.
“I stay up for participating with the Alamo Faculties District group, college, and college students,” Valdez mentioned in a press release. “This partnership presents an essential alternative — an trade of concepts, private tales, social histories, in a second when constructing group and supporting our youth issues most.”
The yearlong residency program is a product of the not too long ago shaped Alamo Faculties District Visible and Performing Arts Fee. It’ll embody classroom visits, visitor lectures and studio visits for college kids all through the 5 group faculties — San Antonio Faculty, Palo Alto Faculty, Northwest Vista Faculty and Northeast Lakeview Faculty.
It’ll additionally contain public occasions, together with an exhibit that includes new items which can be scheduled to be proven this summer time, in addition to a keynote presentation on the district’s Visible and Performing Arts Summit scheduled for April.
This yearlong residency is piloting an concept that had been explored for a few years, forward of the district’s eightieth anniversary, mentioned Alamo Faculties District Chancellor Mike Flores.
This system comes at a complete price of $35,000, and was funded partly by a $6,300 grant awarded to Alamo Faculties by the Texas Fee for the Arts.
“Who higher to be that inaugural artist than Vincent Valdez,” Flores mentioned. “A San Antonian that’s broadly identified and revered, who graduated from [Luther] Burbank Excessive College in SAISD, and who grew to become very profitable and acknowledged with collections right here in San Antonio, all through the USA and globally.”
In his biography, Valdez factors to his fashion of mixing giant, representational work, corresponding to these utilized in Western conventional murals, to depict modern topics.
His work depicts what may be perceived as onerous truths about our society, corresponding to a current exhibit for the Artwork League of Houston — which named him 2023 Artist of the Yr. The set up, titled Siete Dias, featured banners showcasing portraits of a number of the 1000’s of individuals from Central and South America whose disappearances have made it into archives.
“My goal is to incite public remembrance and to impede distorted realities that I witness, just like the social amnesia that surrounds us all,” Valdez states in his web site’s biography.
The district’s function is to offer alternatives for its almost 90,000 college students, its college and the group, to interact in significant conversations, Flores mentioned, and this new function will function a conduit to do this.
“Increased training is about having discussions of who we’re as a society and difficult ourselves to acknowledge [our] historical past, but in addition difficult ourselves to do higher,” Flores mentioned. “I believe the great juxtaposition with Vincent’s physique of labor…his exhibitions, who he’s as a person and artist additionally speaks to that.”
The San Antonio Report companions with Open Campus on increased training protection.
