The Texas department of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has picked its artists-in-residence for 2026: the acclaimed, Austin-based author and artist KB Brookins and the San Antonio-born painter Vincent Valdez. Chosen via an open name of practically 200 candidates, the winners will obtain $30,000 and the chance to work with the ACLU with a watch in direction of legal legislation reform, immigrants’ rights and equality for LGBTIA+ people.
Valdez’s undertaking centres portraits of local people leaders for his New People collection, highlighting on a regular basis residents who “combat the nice combat, like a cussed pulse in a dying coronary heart”. Alongside his work, he plans to create “Know Your Rights” poster packets for state-wide distribution, combining archival analysis and activism with visible communication.
Primarily based between Houston and Los Angeles, Valdez rose to renown via his high-impact representational work that sort out injustice head-on. He’s a recipient of the Ford and Mellon Foundations Latinx Artist Fellowship (in 2022) and the Joan Mitchell Basis Grant for Painters and Sculptors (2016). His first giant museum survey Simply A Dream…, which debuted on the Up to date Arts Museum Houston, is now view at Mass Moca in North Adams, Massachusetts (till 5 Aptil 2026).
Brookins’s work throughout the residency will tackle the pretrial carceral system in Texas jails via a programme of neighborhood organising and workshops alongside their unique compositions, highlighting the plight of these jailed previous to a courtroom listening to due to prohibitive bail prices. A Fort Price native, Brookins based Austin’s poet laureate programme and received the Nice Lakes Schools Affiliation New Writers Award in Inventive Nonfiction and the Dorothy Allison/Felice Picano Rising Author Award with their 2024 memoir Fairly.
“KB Brookins and Vincent Valdez problem us to expertise the world otherwise,” stated Oni Blair, government director of the ACLU of Texas. “Their work reminds us of our shared humanity and the pressing want to guard the rights of all Texans, no exceptions. I’m thrilled they’ll be collaborating with us to focus on the varied and typically contrasting realities that coexist inside our state. On the ACLU of Texas, we imagine the humanities can attain past age, language and tradition to talk reality to energy—and picture a brand new approach ahead”.
Valdez and Brookins take up the ACLU mantle from former artists-in-residence Kill Pleasure, who labored with the Kitchen Yable Puppets & Press to launch a theatrical constitutional rights schooling tour, and Mathieu JN Baptiste, a muralist whose work empowers traditionally disenfranchised demographics of voters.
The ACLU of Texas has lately been main the combat in opposition to censorship on behalf of photographer Sally Mann, whose work was faraway from an exhibition at Fort Price’s Fashionable Artwork Museum. The Fort Price Police lately returned the pictures it had seized from that present after spending practically $7,000 in public funds to go to New York and see Mann’s work on the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork, the place it has not been on show for years.
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