Kathy Vargas
(b. 1950)
Kathy Vargas is a San Antonio native known for creating photographs from multiple exposures and then hand coloring the images to give them warmth and depth. She typically works in a series, and her imagery varies from family and friends to objects that represent her interest in religion, Latin American culture and the cycles of life and death. In many cases, she manipulates her photographs to create montages of multiple overlaid images to give them a hazy, dreamlike appearance.
Though Vargas studied painting and took art classes during and after high school in the late 1960s, she didn’t receive a formal degree until 1981 when she earned a BFA from UTSA followed by an MFA in 1984. Before becoming a fine art photographer, Vargas earned a living working with Tom Wright who photographed rock bands such as The Who, Rod Stewart and the Rolling Stones.
Vargas initially took photos of the people and sites around the neighborhood where she grew up and still lives. She is a natural storyteller, and her work has been heavily influenced by her Chicano heritage. Her family’s deep Catholic faith is evident in the work Vargas produces. Though beautiful on the surface, the carefully composed imagery has deeper meaning dealing with cycles of life and death, joy and grief, light and dark, presence and absence. An interest in Pre-Columbian art inspired Vargas to use symbols in her work such as a heart that can mean love or prayer for a milagro (miracle) or thorns as a symbol of pain and of Christ. Vargas has said of her sometimes difficult imagery, “I’m not morbid. I love life and mine very specifically, but we really have to see the end to love the middle.”
Kathy Vargas’s photographs have been exhibited internationally in Italy, Canada, Peru and Mexico, including a solo retrospective in Germany in 1988. Her work may be found in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian Museum of American Art and the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the El Paso Museum of Art, the McNay Museum of Art in San Antonio, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston and the Art Museum of Southeast Texas in Beaumont.
Art on Campus
Sites and Accompanying Prayers #7
Year: 1992
Medium: Hand-colored Photograph Diptych
Edition: 1/12
Location: Nursing, First Floor
Gift of Betty Moody in Memory of Clint Willour and Reid Mitchell
These two photographic montages are from a series created by Kathy Vargas during a time in her life when many of her friends and family members were dying. Her father passed away in 1991 and her grandmother in 1992. She lost four close friends to AIDS and another four from other causes. She made this series not only to memorialize her loved ones, but also to help herself and others come to terms with the losses in a positive way: “making art in the face of death is part of the healing process.”
The first image depicts an anatomical illustration of a human body that is meant to represent a friend’s illness. The image on the right contains a collage of a heart overlayed on a cross to represent hope for a miracle. The nails symbolize the pain and suffering of Christ. Vargas is expressing the importance of both medicine and faith in the treatment of a patient. Multiple photos were combined into a single image to tell a story. Vargas then applied pink and taupe tones by hand to add warmth to the black and white photographs.
Vargas responded about this work:
I can’t recall who that particular piece was made for, but lots of death and lots of thinking about eternity, so lots of Christian/Catholic symbols embedded in the concept that some are called, as my mother believed, to suffer as Christ did. Not my personal preference after watching so many of them suffer, but what can one do about death? Absolutely nothing.
Still, we go on, we hope, we look for miracles, we reach for our loved ones (the heart symbol is for love as well as for that search for miracles), and we continue. Those we’ve lost are still in our hearts as we are in theirs once they move on. That’s what eternity is for – and yes, I do believe in eternity. We survive pain, whether their physical pain or our emotional pain of loss, and we move forward, happy to have loved and been loved, happy to continue loving.
This photograph came from the personal art collection of celebrated Texas curator Clint Willour. Willour donated over 1,000 works of art to the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, including photographs by Kathy Vargas. Willour helped to grow the museum’s photography collection into one of national importance. Willour’s remaining collection was inherited by Betty Moody, a celebrated Houston Gallerist. Moody gifted this photo to Lamar University along with many other museum-worthy pieces of art in 2023.