My imagery is informed both by faith and ancestral stories and histories.

Kathy Vargas is an artist/photographer from San Antonio, Texas. Her hand-coloured, multiple-exposure photographs have become her signature, although she also has roots in rock-and-roll photography. Her imagery is informed both by her faith and her ancestral stories and histories.

Vargas received her MFA from the University of Texas at San Antonio in 1984.  She has had solo exhibits in Rome, Mexico City, and Buenos Aires, as well as retrospectives at the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio and Universität Erlangen in Germany.  Two major travelling exhibits that featured Varga’s works include Hospice: A Photographic Inquiry at the Corcoran Gallery, Washington, D.C. (1996), and Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation (1990-1993), are credited with raising the profiles of Chicano/a art nationally and internationally.

Her work is in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Toledo Museum of Art, the National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and others.  Named the 2005 Texas Two-Dimensional Artist of the Year by the Texas Commission on the Arts, she also received a Light Work Residency in 1993 and an Artpace Residency in 1997.  Her papers are housed at the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art.  She is currently a professor of Art/Photography at the University of the Incarnate Word.