ALBERT SOTO

In honor of albert soto

A Tucson native, Soto graduated from Tucson High School and the University of Arizona. After college, he pursued a career in the fashion industry in several U.S. cities. Albert returned to Tucson in 1987 to shift his career to its arts orientation. He joined the Tucson-Pima Arts Council(TPAC, now The Arts Foundation for Tucson and Southern Arizona) in 1991.

Albert Soto was the arts administrator for TPAC and used that position to promote the efforts of struggling young artists. He would do this by finding them grant money, developing opportunities to display their works to the public, and giving them much-needed encouragement and advice.

“He wanted very much to have young artists flourish, particularly artists who were often on the margins,” said longtime friend and associate Barclay Goldsmith, founder of Borderlands Theater. “He wanted to help them find their voices and their passions. Albert was very concerned that grants be distributed to as many young and new voices as possible. He was a dreamer. He was doing stuff nobody else was doing.”

As a champion of Graffiti Art in Tucson in the 1990s and early 2000s, Albert did everything from finding walls, commissioning murals, working with the city, and defusing tensions with the anti-graffiti task force.

Albert was a strong advocate for the art form. He diligently educated people about the differences between Graffiti Art and gang-related tagging, which was often seen as one in the same. He worked with City officials to secure legal walls for graffiti artists to produce work. 

Albert worked hand-in-hand with David Wright and Andy Bernard from the Sixth Congress Gallery on their Spray Can Art show and symposium. He helped the Sixth Congress Gallery navigate the city’s bureaucracy, apply for grants, get donations, and was even able to secure a considerable contribution of spray paint from Raytheon Technologies. He was a networking machine, known and loved by everyone, and was able to call in favors when needed.

The symposium and spraycan workshop were huge successes that drew in more than 350 attendees.

As a Graffiti Art advocate, one of Albert’s most notable accomplishments was taking three young graffiti artists and one mariachi to an international art exchange in Italy. There, they attended art lectures, symposiums, and events and participated in producing a community mural in the heart of Rome. Albert was amazed at how revered Graffiti Art was in Italy. He was overjoyed at how impactful the experience was for the young artist. He often cited it as one of his most significant accomplishments at TPAC.

Monty “SES ONE” Esposito and Joshua “DEMO ONE” Behshad were two of the four selected artists on this trip. 

Albert Soto, 51 at the time, passed away on November 26, 2005.