Rubio: El Corazón

Rubio: El Corazón

Through Sunday, Oct 4, 2026

El Corazon is an exhibition consisting of a wide spanning selections of drawings and paintings from Rubio’s decades-long career, with works ranging from 1989 to 2026. Rubio’s subject matter focuses on the Westside of San Antonio, where the artist grew up and lives today. From his youth learning under muralist Juan Hernandez to his time as an artistic mentor working with students through public schools and community arts programs like San Anto Cultural Arts and the Contemporary MOSAIC Student Artist Program, Rubio has brought art to his barrio and from his barrio to the world.

Rubio’s paintings and drawings include autobiographical stories, neighborhood scenes, Catholic and folkloric iconography, political critique, and linear abstraction. Rubio has developed his style and themes over time with the intent of building on the tradition and concerns of the Chicano Art Movement, all the while progressing contemporary Chicano Art visual language. Through mentorship, he passes the torch to the next generation of Xicanx artists.

Rubio weaves in hyper-local vernacular intermixed with rich symbolism and allegory. This layering tells a story of culture and current events. In his Space Shuttle Atzlan, Rubio references the space shuttle Columbia stopping at Kelly Airforce base in March 1979. In his lowriderification of the space shuttle, Rubio has added a Virgen de Guadalupe, the nixtamalized corn dough “Masa” taking the place of NASA, and Aztlan as a reference to Aztec ancestral home mythologies which were established as a political symbol during the Chicano Movement. The application of this iconography also nods to a pre-colonial relationship with the cosmos as a part of Aztec creation mythology.

Berlin Tank is one in a recent series of drawings started during Rubio’s residency at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien as an awardee of the Contemporary’s Berlin Residency Program. The work is a return to detailed graphite drawing after a long period of working predominantly with acrylic. Imperial symbols of war, greed, and power seen in earlier works, such as his series of Corazón paintings and H-Bomb reemerge and are applied to new subject matter inspired by the history of Berlin. This series sees Rubio transplanting his aesthetic into a new context.

This exhibition is a broad-reaching representation of the curvilinear line work emblematic to Rubio’s entire oeuvre. Whether detailed and exaggerated as in El Tecato, subtle and soft as in the portrait of Vincent Valdez, or as an abstract subject like the mural Blue on the façade of the Contemporary, Rubio’s signature linework is a network of arteries traversing and transporting life throughout the composition, mirroring the ways in which the intertwining roads of Westside San Antonio are the circulatory system of San Antonio Chicano history and lived experience.

Jacqueline Saragoza McGilvray
Curator and Exhibitions Director