[2] Cruz received a John Hay Whitney Fellowship and awards from the Joan Mitchell Foundation and from the National Endowment for the Arts.

[1] In the late 1968, Emilio and wife Patricia Cruz moved to St. Louis to work with Julius Hemphill and the Black Artists Group.

Geno Rodriquez, Curator and Executive Director of The Alternative Museum, wrote in 1985, "Emilio Cruz, is a brilliant and impassioned artist whose current paintings are monumental, imbued with intelligence, fury and an apt sense of irony.

Art historian and curator Paul Staiti wrote in 1997, "Emilio Cruz's Homo sapiens series is a strange and haunting genealogy of the modern soul... What is at stake here more than biopolitical culture, is the remystification of the body and mapping of consciousness ... For all the trauma, explicit and implicit, Cruz's style is masterful, classical, even beautiful.

[2][5][6][7] In 1994, Cruz's work was shown as part of the American contingent at the IV Bienal Internacional de Pintura en Cuenca, Ecuador.

Other American artists exhibiting at this show were Donald Locke, Philemona Williamson, Whitfield Lovell and Freddy Rodríguez.