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 by way of an open name of practically 200 candidates, the winners will obtain $30,000 and the chance to work with the ACLU with an eye fixed in the direction of legal regulation reform, immigrants’ rights and equality for LGBTIA+ people.
Valdez’s mission centres portraits of local people leaders for his New People sequence, highlighting on a regular basis residents who “battle the nice battle, 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 by way of 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 massive 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 in the course of the residency will tackle the pretrial carceral system in Texas jails by way of a programme of group organising and workshops alongside their unique compositions, highlighting the plight of these jailed previous to a court docket listening to due to prohibitive bail prices. A Fort Value native, Brookins based Austin’s poet laureate programme and gained the Nice Lakes Schools Affiliation New Writers Award in Artistic 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,” mentioned Oni Blair, govt 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 spotlight the various and generally contrasting realities that coexist inside our state. On the ACLU of Texas, we consider the humanities can attain past age, language and tradition to talk reality to energy—and picture a brand new means 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 just lately been main the battle towards censorship on behalf of photographer Sally Mann, whose work was faraway from an exhibition at Fort Value’s Fashionable Artwork Museum. The Fort Value Police just lately returned the images 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.
