césar a. martínez

2026 Lifetime Achievement Award in the Visual Arts

On view: September 18 - December 20, 2026

Opening Reception: Friday, September 18, 2025, from 6 - 8 PM

Art League Houston is honored to announce the César A. Martínez - 2026 Lifetime Achievement Award in the Visual Arts exhibition, featuring a selection of works by the artist throughout the five decades of his groundbreaking career. ​The exhibition is on view from September 18 through December 20, 2026, with an opening reception Friday, September 18, 2026, from 6 - 8 PM. The exhibition will be accompanied by a forthcoming publication featuring an essay by scholar and artist Ruben C. Cordova, PhD, and designed by Lindsay Starr.

About the Exhibition: 

The César A. Martínez - 2026 Lifetime Achievement Award in the Visual Arts exhibition at Art League Houston marks a homecoming of sorts for the artist. Nearly fifty years ago, his work was featured in the landmark 1977 Dále Gas: An Exhibition of Contemporary Chicano Art exhibition at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, curated by then chief curator Santos Martínez, Jr. As the first major museum exhibition of Chicano art in Texas, it connected many Houston audiences with the work of César A. Martínez for the first time. Now, with his Lifetime Achievement Award in the Visual Arts from Art League, Martínez returns to Houston with an exhibition of works that spans the five decades of his career.

Martínez is revered for his work across four major series – Bato/Pachuco, Mestizo, South Texas, and Serape. He works in a diverse range of media, which has included painting, drawing, printmaking, collage, constructions, photography, and digital work – and he is also a gifted writer.

The exhibition begins with the Bato/Pachuco series, depicting composite images in his drawings, paintings, and prints based on real individuals Martínez encountered in his life, and research across various sources including candid photos, yearbooks, and newspapers. The artist describes their striking compositions and his influences:

“By isolating the personages in an abstract color field, I can make them very specific and unavoidable. Through selective use of color, the color field serves to enhance the mood or attitude that I want to convey….color choice can be ironic. I was very much influenced by color-field painting during my formative college years. I was particularly taken by the nuanced work of Mark Rothko, Jules Olitski and Kenneth Noland. Fair to say they influenced those fields of color in my work.  I’ve referred to this field of color as an abstract landscape, the usual band of color at the top suggesting a horizon line.”  

With the Mestizo series, Martínez refigures iconography from early Chicano art such as La Virgen de Guadalupe and the Francisco Eppens mural La Vida, La Muerte, El Mestizaje y Los Cuatro Elementos at UNAM in Mexico City:

“Reinventing familiar images or ideas became a way to expand on the Mestizo theme. This series attempts to bridge that vast expanse, el mar que nos sepára from the cultures that are our heritage. The Mestizo series is my way of dealing with the big picture, a world view and how we fit in it.”

The artist has incorporated found and reclaimed materials throughout his practice, as can be seen with the collage referencing Mesoamerican imagery Aztec, made of recycled beer and gum wrappers, and also in his South Texas series.

In the South Texas series, Martínez draws on his deep connections to his birthplace, Laredo, and the surrounding regions of south Texas and northern Mexico, while continuing to explore the creative challenges that recycled materials present:

“I also felt a need to include real items in this series and started using actual South Texas dirt and sand and grass and mesquite leaves in these new works. That led to the idea of constructions made of found materials, old scrap lumber and an assortment of metal scraps, old, rusty, shot-up tin cans, rusted corrugated metal and even car hoods from the junk-yard. Cranky materials pose technical difficulties but I am always up to challenges. I do a variety of work, some modes more scripted than others, but I have a need for doing less scripted work and cut loose, be improvisational and this series affords me the opportunity.”

The final series shown in the exhibition, Serape, connects his early experiences as a college student encountering Gene Davis’ vertical stripe paintings for the first time, with his own cultural context:

“Way back, in the sixties, when I was in college, I would sneak into a prof’s office and sit there rapt, looking through his art magazines. I ran across the work of Gene Davis, the ‘stripe’ painter. For the first time in my life, before any cultural notions of ‘Chicano’ were on the horizon, I reacted to works of contemporary art from a cultural standpoint. ‘These are like serapes!’ I said to myself. Very recently, I have returned to the series, changed my technical approach, pared the serape idea down to the essentials and have gotten very satisfying results. Instead of isolating the serape part in a color field, or on an unpainted ground as in the early ones on paper, I started utilizing the whole appropriately proportioned canvas or paper so as to create a whole painting as an object. It is probably the closest I’ve come to ‘pure’ painting, for its own sake.”

Through the four series and broad range of media featured in this exhibition, visitors can gain an understanding of the extraordinary depth and range of this legendary figure in the Chicano art movement. In addition to his own work, Martínez has mentored and influenced many fellow artists and scholars and his impacts on art in Texas will be felt for generations to come.

(The artist quotations are from his website, which is a comprehensive archive of both his art and writing. Please visit https://cesaramartinez.com/.)

About the Artist:

César A. Martínez was born in Laredo, Texas, 1944, and graduated from Texas A&I University, Kingsville in 1968. He lives and works in San Antonio, Texas. A significant figure in the late 1970s and 1980s Chicano Art Movement, Martínez’s portraits are Mexican American art history icons. Deeply rooted in his native South Texas and its Mexican American culture, Martínez’s work reflects a broad knowledge of the Western art canon and finds inspiration from color-field paintings, Mexican architecture, and photography.

“I’ve never really done art that I would say is political. But I think the kind of art that becomes politicized, as in my case and in many of my contemporaries, is simply because it had a Chicano perspective or Chicano imagery. The Chicano Movement was such an overpowering thing that I couldn’t help but become associated with it. The Chicano Movement was a renaissance in thinking about us and in creating those institutions and images and writings that reflected who we are. They were non-existent at that time, we had nothing to relate to, so we had to make it up as we went along. And that was the road to a deeper understanding of who we are.” – César A. Martínez.

His work has been acquired by the Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and The National Gallery of Art, Washington. His work is also part of the permanent collection of the Brooklyn Art Museum, New York; The Cheech Center, Riverside; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; McNay Art Museum, San Antonio; San Antonio Museum of Art, San Antonio; and the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum, Chicago.

The artist has been featured and reviewed in Hyperallergic, Art in America, and The New York Times. In 1997, Martínez was an Artpace San Antonio International Artist-in-Residence, and in 1999, the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio, TX, organized a retrospective of Martínez’s work titled César A. Martínez: A Retrospective accompanied by a publication.

Major support for the exhibition and the forthcoming publication is generously provided by the Edaren Foundation, the John P. McGovern Foundation, the Jacques Louis Vidal Charitable Fund, and an anonymous donor.

About the Award:

In celebration of Martínez’s recognition with the 2026 Lifetime Achievement Award in the Visual Arts, Jamal Cyrus as the 2026 Texas Artist of the Year, Surpik Angelini as the 2026 Lifetime Achievement Award in Arts Leadership, and Joe Diaz as the 2026 Texas Patron of the Year, a Gala will be held in their honor at the Thompson Hotel on Friday, October 9, 2026. For more information about tickets and sponsorships, please visit https://www.artleaguehouston.org/2026-gala-remix.

Art League Houston’s Contemporary Texas Art Archive Program

Our Contemporary Texas Art Archive Program is a cornerstone of Art League Houston's commitment to highlighting and preserving critically important aspects of contemporary Texas art history. Through both the Texas Artist of the Year and the Lifetime Achievement Award in the Visual Arts initiatives, this program platforms artists who have demonstrated exceptional creative achievement that significantly impacts contemporary visual art in Texas. With exhibitions, documentary video interviews, and publications, we archive the rich and diverse histories of these artists.

Lifetime Achievement Award in the Visual Arts

Established in 2013, Art League Houston’s Lifetime Achievement Award in the Visual Arts honors living artists whose careers have spanned more than four decades and whose sustained creative practice has made an outstanding contribution to the visual arts in Texas and beyond. The award recognizes artists who have developed a substantial and influential body of work, demonstrated an enduring commitment to their artistic practice, and helped shape the cultural landscape across generations by mentoring other artists.

Through retrospective exhibitions, documentary interviews, publications, artist talks, and related archival materials, ALH preserves each artist honoree’s work, experiences, and contributions as part of its Contemporary Texas Art Archive. Together, these resources expand public, scholarly, and educational access to important narratives in Texas art.

Past honorees include Kathy Vargas, Earlie Hudnall, Jr., Celia Álvarez Muñoz, George Smith, Jesse Lott, Forrest Prince, and Kermit Oliver. Their work reflects the depth and diversity of artistic practices that have shaped contemporary visual art in Texas and contributed to broader national and international movements.