I always wonder how my photos are doing once they go out into the world. It’s like sending your children away from home after they’re all grown up. Are they having good conversations, are they meeting people who will be accepting? It’s wonderful to know that someone has seen my images and is willing to be in conversation with them.

Kathy Vargas has had numerous solo exhibitions including Sala Uno in Rome, Galeria Juan Martin in Mexico City, Centro Recoleta in Buenos Aires, and retrospectives at the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio and the Universitat Erlangen in Germany. Group exhibitions include Hospice: A Photographic Inquiry, a traveling exhibition commissioned by the Corcoran Gallery, From Media to Metaphor: Art About AIDS, Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation, and Xican-a.o.x Body. She is in the collections of the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum, the Amon Carter Museum, Centro de la Imagen in Mexico D.F., the Toledo Art Museum, and Houston’s MFA as well as several private collections.

From 1984–86 she was an arts writer/critic for the San Antonio Light concentrating on Latino art and Photography. From 1985–2000 she was Visual Arts Program Director for the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center, San Antonio Texas. From 2000 to the present, she has been professor of art/photography at the University of the Incarnate Word.

She was a board member of Art Matters from 1993 to 2000. She has also served on San Antonio’s Public Art Commission and Centro de Artes Committee.

Named 2005 Texas Two-Dimensional Artist of the Year by the Texas Commission on the Arts, she also received San Antonio’s Medal of the Arts in 2019, a Lightwork Residency in 1995, an Art Pace Residency in 1996, and a Lifetime Achievement in the Visual Arts Award from the Art League Houston in 2024.

Her work is included in numerous books including Paul Matte’s Open Aperture, the Evolution of Photography in an Abstract World and Lucy Lippard’s Mixed Blessings. Her papers are housed at the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art.