The American Civil Liberties Union of Texas (ACLU of Texas) named Houston-based painter Vincent Valdez and Austin-based creator KB Brookins recipients of its artists-in-residence program for 2025–26.
As a part of the residency, each artists will obtain $30,000 every to fund particular person tasks. They may also work alongside the ACLU of Texas and neighborhood leaders to advocate for civil and particular person rights throughout the state.
Valdez plans to color portraits of local people leaders who’re working to tell and problem the system. He’ll mix these work with Know Your Rights info and archival analysis to create poster packets that will likely be distributed statewide.
Brookins seeks to handle pretrial detention in Texas jails, primarily in Harris County, by way of authentic compositions, workshops, neighborhood organizing, and public displays. Their work highlights problems with mass incarceration in Texas, the place two out of three persons are jailed earlier than a court docket listening to as a result of they’ll’t afford bail.
“Vincent Valdez and KB Brookins problem us to expertise the world differently,” Oni Ok. Blair, government director of the ACLU of Texas, mentioned in an announcement. “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 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 fact to energy — and picture a brand new method ahead.”
The pair have been chosen out of roughly 200 candidates following a statewide open name.
They succeed the artist Kill Pleasure, who labored with Kitchen Desk Puppets & Press to steer a statewide immigrants’ rights tour that includes huge 12- to 15-foot puppets that knowledgeable attendees of their constitutional rights amid escalating anti-immigrant insurance policies.
The announcement follows problems with censorship within the state for which the ACLU of Texas fought alongside other civil liberties unions on behalf of Sally Mann, whose work was faraway from a bunch exhibition on the Fashionable Artwork Museum of Fort Value.
