Alex Rubio

Alex Rubio (born 1968), who currently uses the name Rubio Rubio, is a San Antonio based muralist, painter, and printmaker. He is also a teacher and youth mentor.

He grew up in the Mirasol housing project on the West Side of the city. Rubio was raised by Guy Rubio, a single mother who worked in a tamale factory,

Career When he was 13, Rubio began work with a tattoo artist, and he soon went into the tattoo business independently. Accepting barter as well as cash, he had five bicycles at one time. He was engaged by Community Cultural Arts (CCA) to paint walls at the Mirasol Housing project, where he lived. CCA taught him how to paint with brushes. When Rubio was 16, he was put on staff as a CCA designer. Rubio mentored a young Vincent Valdez (b. 1977), who became his muralist partner. The director of a community cultural arts organization hired Rubio to do murals in 1987.

In 1989, Rubio, who was then 20 years old, was commissioned to do a painting for the San Fernando Cathedral in San Antonio. The result was a (13 x 10-foot) painting called the Virgin of Guadalupe, in which the artist developed his "signature style, with curvilinear lines." The artist described it as "a natural way of me making marks on a large canvas."

Rubio has studied at the San Antonio Art Institute and the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA). He subsequently studied printmaking with the late Sam Coronado. Rubio mentored MOSAIC students who completed a “Dream Peace” mural at the Coleman Underpass bridge in San Antonio in 2016.

According to one writer, for Rubio, "historic preservation of his Latino culture once meant documenting the everyday scenes of his neighborhood through painting. Now he also sees it as mentoring the youth on how to express themselves through their art, and in turn perpetuating the dialogue of the Latino experience."

Rubio calls San Antonio "the most important place in the world," and he hopes his work will lead others "to find their own connections to community and culture.” He connected this personal tragedy to the sighting of the Lechuza, the owl woman of Mexican and Chicano folklore. Though the Lechuza is typically regarded as an evil creature to be regarded with fear, Rubio grew up with a more positive view of her. Rubio learned from his mother that while the Lechuza is ominous, it also serves a unique, positive function. She taught Rubio that the Lechuza must be regarded with respect because it serves as a messenger of danger. Rubio says he did not believe in the Lechuza until the fateful night he saw one. Rubio says he now realizes that she was trying to warn him to stay home. But he instead went out to party, and, as a consequence, Rubio nearly died from a gunshot that lodged near his heart (the basis of his 1994 drawing). The artist believes that failing to heed the Lechuza's warning almost cost him his life. This experience turned him into an ardent believer.

Rubio's large-scale painting of the Lechuza (2001) is rendered with bright colors in his curvilinear style. It traveled widely in the Chicano Visions: Painters on the Verge exhibition. Rubio also traveled from venue to venue with the exhibition. This is how he learned that belief in the Lechuza is widespread in Mexican and Chicano communities. Rubio's Lechuza is in the collection of the Cheech Marin Center for Art and Culture in Riverside, CA.

Rubio was the recipient of a Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant in 2007. In that year, he was also an international artist in residence at Artpace in San Antonio.

His 2008 installation at Artpace in San Antonio, done in collaboration with other artists, was called "the standout in the most recent round of Artpace residents and not just because of his powerful and signature use of color.... Rubio’s tire shop completely transformed the gallery and upon entering, I felt I had left Artpace."

Several of Rubio's works were included in the San Antonio Museum of Art's Psychedelic: Optical and Visionary Art Since the 1960s exhibition in 2010. Rubio's Four Horsemen were exhibited at SAMA in an independent exhibition at the same time.

In 2015, Rubio and his students in the MOSAIC program completed Yanaguana on four large canvases, as the first of several murals for the Art Wall, for the Yanaguana Garden at Hemisfair Park.

Rubio has participated in various art-related public service activities, including a panel called “How to Collect“ at Blue Star in 2016.

One of Rubio's recent public works is “Aqua,” situated in the San Pedro Creek Culture Park in downtown San Antonio. Rubio recorded a video treating this project in 2018. The Architect's Newspaper referred to the park as "San Antonio's Latino High Line" in 2018.

As part of the City of San Antonio's virtual Day of the Dead parade, Rubio painted a large skull in 2020 for annual display during Day of the Dead. He said he hoped his bright colors and curvilinear design will serve to “lighten up that dark heavy stigma that death instills in people,” and inspire them to “enjoy life and also, in a way, enjoy the afterlife.”

In 2021 Rubio painted a mural of a masked man, the first work in a series of artworks that are part of the City of San Antonio's COVID-19 prevention awareness campaign.

In 2025 Rubio was selected to publicly paint a mural during Luminaria, an annual San Antonio art festival.

Works The Virgin of Guadalupe, 1989, oil on canvas

Pura Raspa, 2007, acrylic on canvas

Cheech Marin Center for Arts and Culture, Riverside, CA

Fort Wayne Museum of Art, Fort Wayne, IN

Mexic Arte Museum, Austin, TX

National Hispanic Cultural Center, Albuquerque, NM

National Museum of Mexican Art, Chicago, IL

McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, TX

San Antonio Museum of Art, San Antonio, TX

Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.

UTSA Libraries Art Collection, San Antonio, TX

Awards 2011 Vermont Studio Center, Residency, Vermont.

2007 Joan Mitchell Foundation, Artist Grant. New York, NY

2007 Art Pace Residency Grant, Artpace Foundation. San Antonio, TX

2002 S.A.L.A. Residency Grant, Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center. San Antonio, TX, and Self Help Graphics Center, Los Angeles CA.

1998-1999 Primer Paso Residency Grant, Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center. San Antonio, TX

1997 London Residency Grant, Artpace Foundation. San Antonio, TX 1992-1996

1997 Artist in Residence Program, Texas Commission on the Arts,

1997 Bexar County Detention Center (I.C.A.P.), San Antonio, TX

Books and Catalogs Banks, Melissa Richardson and Cheech Marin. Los Tejanos: Chicano Art from the Cheech Marin Collection. (2018). CauseConnect.

Cordova, Ruben C. (2004). ¡Arte Caliente! Selections from the Joe A. Diaz Collection. Corpus Christi, TX: South Texas Institute for the Arts, pp. 58–60.

Cordova, Ruben Charles. (2019). The Day of the Dead in Art. San Antonio: Centro de Artes San Antonio, pp. 26–27, 31. https://www.sa.gov/files/assets/main/v/2/arts/documents/the-day-of-the-dead-in-art-ruben-c.-cordova.pdf

Cuba, Nan, and Riley Robinson. (2008). Art at Our Doorstep: San Antonio Writers + Artists. San Antonio: Trinity University Press, p. 19.

Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center (San Antonio, Tex). (1998). The Role of Paper = El Papel Del Papel: A Traveling Exhibition Organized by the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center in San Antonio, Texas. San Antonio, Tex., New Dimension Press.

Keller, Gary D., Mary Erickson, Kaytie Johnson, Joaquín Alvarado, Arturo J. Aldama, and Craig Smith. 2002. Contemporary Chicana and Chicano Art : Artists, Works, Culture, and Education. Tempe, Arizona: Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingüe, p. 246-47, 263.

Marin, Cheech, Max Benavidez, Constance Cortez, and Terecita Romo. (2002). Chicano Visions : American Painters on the Verge. Boston: Little, Brown and Co, pp. 118–19.

Fred Preston, Fred, and Carmen Tafolla. (2022). PARTE DEL PUEBLO: The Outdoor Public Art of San Antonio. Schiffer Books.

Rubin, David S., Robert C. Morgan, Daniel Pinchbeck, San Antonio Museum of Art, University of Rochester Memorial Art Gallery, and Telfair Museum of Art. (2010). Psychedelic: Optical and Visionary Art since the 1960s. San Antonio, TX, Cambridge, Mass.: San Antonio Museum of Art; in association with the MIT Press, pp. 29, 43, 89.