Alamo Colleges District announced its first ever artist-in-residence for the 2025-26 academic year: San Antonio native Vincent Valdez.
Valdez is a nationally and internationally recognized artist whose paintings and murals have landed him exhibitions at The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art and The National Portrait Gallery, among others.
“I look forward to engaging with the Alamo Colleges District community, faculty, and students,” Valdez said in a statement. “This partnership offers an important opportunity — an exchange of ideas, personal stories, social histories, in a moment when building community and supporting our youth matters most.”
The yearlong residency program is a product of the recently formed Alamo Colleges District Visual and Performing Arts Commission. It will include classroom visits, guest lectures and studio visits for students throughout the five community colleges — San Antonio College, Palo Alto College, Northwest Vista College and Northeast Lakeview College.
It will also involve public events, including an exhibit featuring new pieces that are scheduled to be shown this summer, as well as a keynote presentation at the district’s Visual and Performing Arts Summit scheduled for April.
This yearlong residency is piloting an idea that had been explored for a couple of years, ahead of the district’s 80th anniversary, said Alamo Colleges District Chancellor Mike Flores.
The program comes at a total cost of $35,000, and was funded in part by a $6,300 grant awarded to Alamo Colleges by the Texas Commission for the Arts.
“Who better to be that inaugural artist than Vincent Valdez,” Flores said. “A San Antonian that is widely known and respected, who graduated from [Luther] Burbank High School in SAISD, and who became very successful and recognized with collections here in San Antonio, throughout the United States and globally.”
In his biography, Valdez points to his style of blending large, representational paintings, such as those used in Western traditional murals, to depict contemporary subjects.
His work depicts what can be perceived as hard truths about our society, such as a recent exhibit for the Art League of Houston — which named him 2023 Artist of the Year. The installation, titled Siete Dias, featured banners showcasing portraits of some of the thousands of people from Central and South America whose disappearances have made it into archives.
“My aim is to incite public remembrance and to impede distorted realities that I witness, like the social amnesia that surrounds us all,” Valdez states in his website’s biography.
The district’s role is to provide opportunities for its nearly 90,000 students, its faculty and the community, to engage in meaningful conversations, Flores said, and this new role will serve as a conduit to do that.
“Higher education is about having discussions of who we are as a society and challenging ourselves to recognize [our] history, but also challenging ourselves to do better,” Flores said. “I think the wonderful juxtaposition with Vincent’s body of work…his exhibitions, who he is as an individual and artist also speaks to that.”
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