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Current Exhibitions at the McNay
- ESTAMPAS DE LA RAZA
CONTEMPORARY PRINTS FROM THE ROMO COLLECTION
September 25, 2012 | January 27, 2013This survey of Mexican American and Latino printmakers chronicles the late 1960s at the outset of the Chicano Movement to the confident expressions of the 2000s. Estampas de la Raza introduces recent gifts to the McNay from San Antonio collectors Harriett and Ricardo Romo. More than 60 prints by 44 artists reveal the richness of a mixed cultural heritage, with depictions of Frida Kahlo, lowriders, the Statue of Liberty, tattoos, and the Virgin of Guadalupe. Organized thematically in five sections, both the catalogue and the exhibition focus on aspects of the Latino experience in the United States: the identity of individuals striving to define themselves; the Chicano Movement’s struggle to achieve economic, political, and personal equality; tradition, memory, and culture in the everyday lives of Latinos; icons that serve as guideposts; and other voices revealing the complex and ever-changing directions Latinos choose. Many images are larger than life, serving up a colorful, visual feast.
Harriett and Ricardo Romo began acquiring art while teaching in Southern California at the height of the Chicano Movement in the late 1960s. As educators, they saw collecting as a means of supporting the artists as well as the movement’s goal of equal educational opportunity in Los Angeles’s school system. Intensely involved with Self Help Graphics & Art, a nexus of Chicano culture in East LA, the Romos bought many prints from the renowned collaborative print shop. After their return to Texas, they continued supporting Latino artists and became patrons of another highly important print shop, Coronado Studio in Austin.
Gifts since 2008 from Harriett Romo, a sociology professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio, and Ricardo Romo, UTSA’s president, now constitute one of the largest donations in the history of the McNay’s print collection, at present totaling 200 works that survey the best Chicano and Latino prints produced in Southern California and Texas in the last four decades. This exhibition celebrates the Romos’ generosity and the unique character, diversity, and richness these images bring to the museum’s American print collection.
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This exhibition was organized by the McNay Art Museum.
The Elizabeth Huth Coates Charitable Foundation of 1992 is generously providing lead sponsorship.
Major sponsors are the McCombs Foundation in honor of Connie McCombs McNab and Charline McCombs; the William and Salomé Scanlan Foundation; Frost Bank; the Marcia and Otto Koehler Foundation; and the Dan and Gloria Oppenheimer Fund of the San Antonio Area Foundation.
Additional supporters are Malu and Carlos Alvarez; Rita and John Feik; Ford, Powell & Carson Architects and Planners, Inc.; Gloria Galt; Terry Touhey; Kathy and Lionel Sosa, the Director’s Circle; and the Host Committee.
The San Antonio Express-News is contributing media sponsorship. - PRINTS OF THE PEOPLE
THE TALLER DE GRÁFICA POPULAR
September 19, 2012 | January 20, 2013The Taller de Gráfica Popular (People’s Print Workshop, or TGP) was one of the most influential print studios of the 20th century. Founded in Mexico City in 1937, the TGP’s mission was informed greatly by ideals of the Mexican Revolution of 1910, especially equal access to educational opportunities and the championing of Mexicanidad, the unique heritage of Mexico created by the melding of indigenous and European cultures. The TGP’s collaborative print shop taught printmaking, mostly lithography and linoleum block printing, to those who had no previous art training. The goal, much like that of the Mexican mural movement, was to create art about Mexican culture, history, and the goals of the revolution for a broader audience.
Though not as famous as los Tres Grandes—José Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera, and David Alfaro Siqueiros, the artist members of the TGP were prolific and highly political printmakers, with a tremendous influence on print workshops around the world. Their collaborative printmaking model inspired other shops in the U.S., throughout Europe, and in Japan. Foreign artists came to work at the TGP and took its collaborative model back to their home countries. Self Help Graphics & Art in Los Angeles, one of the presses that published prints in Estampas de la Raza: Contemporary Prints from the Romo Collection, was inspired by the TGP’s example.
One of the masterpieces of the exhibition is Posada en Su Taller (Posada in His Studio). This large linocut created by one of the founders of the TGP, Leopoldo Méndez, ties the studio to Mexico’s great printmaking history and tradition, specifically to the father of modern Mexican printmaking, José Guadalupe Posada. Méndez shows Posada watching government soldiers repress fieldworkers demonstrating for land reform as he works on a plate for one of his prints. This protest print carried on a tradition of the TGP, as well as inspiring artists in the Estampas exhibition.
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This exhibition was organized by the McNay Art Museum.
The Elizabeth Huth Coates Exhibition Endowment and the Arthur and Jane Stieren Fund for Exhibitions are generously funding this exhibition. AMERICA’S FINEST
Born in San Antonio in 1977, Vincent Valdez showed promise as an artist at an early age. His family, including a great grandfather who was also an artist, encouraged him from the beginning, providing art supplies and lots of paper for the young Valdez. Studying with his friend and muralist Alex Rubio, Valdez became an accomplished muralist by the time he entered high school and painted several walls at his alma mater, Burbank High School on San Antonio’s Southside. Valdez received a BA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2000 and soon after returned to San Antonio, setting up a studio and giving back to the community as a teacher. In 2004, Valdez became the youngest artist ever to have a solo exhibition at the McNay when the museum organized a show of his suite of charcoal drawings Stations, focusing on the struggles of a boxer on fight night.
RECENT WORK BY VINCENT VALDEZ
September 25, 2012 | January 27, 2013
Continuing his ruminations on individuals facing the challenges of their lives alone and without assistance, Valdez recently completed a suite of six large graphite drawings of boxers of different ethnicities—African American, Asian American, Native American—titled America’s Finest. These boxers who struggle in the ring for their very survival are stand-ins for everyday people who must fight daily battles to endure. The drawings make specific, personal realities into something universal. While working on the America’s Finest drawings, Valdez also started a series of paintings, drawings, and prints focusing on experiences of combat veterans returning home from Iraq and Afghanistan. He soon realized that these soldiers were also “America’s Finest,” fighting their own battles against posttraumatic stress and coping with returning to normal life. The artist’s first hand experience of seeing an old high school friend deal with the issues all combat veterans face inspired these works. Like the boxer drawings, images of the soldier, whom the artist calls “John” as in “John Doe,” straddle the line between the personal and the universal.
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This exhibition was organized by the McNay Art Museum.LISA HOKE
“The future ain’t what it used to be”
Sculptor Lisa Hoke uses found materials in her large, brightly colored wall and window works, creating joyous, swirling compositions from plastic cups, cereal boxes, six-pack holders, pinwheels, and other everyday objects. Working in her New York studio, Hoke selects materials from color-sorted bins of salvage and arranges items on the floor through an intuitive working process. Titled “The future ain’t what it used to be,” the installation was commissioned by the McNay to initiate a new series of wall works in the Stieren Center for Exhibition’s AT&T Lobby. The title is a nod to baseball player Yogi Berra’s paradoxical prediction, as well as to the installation’s ephemeral images of consumer excess.
Born in Virginia Beach, Virginia, in 1952, Hoke received a Bachelor of Arts from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro in 1974, followed by a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Virginia Commonwealth University in 1978. She has created temporal works for many exhibitions, including the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (Mass MoCA), North Adams; the Michele & Donald D’Amour Museum of Fine Arts, Springfield, Massachusetts; New Britain Museum of American Art, Connecticut; Rice University Art Gallery, Houston, Texas; and Serpentine Gallery, London, England. In 2013, Hoke premiers another new work at the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh.
This installation was commissioned by the McNay Art Museum.FOR JERRY
Jerry Lawson, daughter of famed oilman Gus Glasscock, as well as a savvy businessperson and rancher in her own right, became acquainted with the McNay Art Museum shortly after moving to San Antonio from Corpus Christi in the 1960s. As the story goes, she bought a wonderful Gauguin woodcut while on a business trip and decided to get an opinion of the work from the McNay’s director. John Palmer Leeper immediately recognized the print as one of the artist’s best and was duly impressed with Jerry. He was even more impressed shortly after, when she brought in another masterful Gauguin impression. He took her to lunch and thus began a decades-long relationship between the museum, its staff, and Jerry.
MASTERPIECES FROM THE LAWSON BEQUEST
September 12, 2012 | January 13, 2013
Lawson gave the museum numerous prints over the years, but her greatest gift to the print collection was her decision to fund construction of the Jerry Lawson Print Gallery. When completed in 1982, it was the only facility in Texas dedicated to exhibitions of works of art on paper. When Jerry died in 1993, she left her own print collection, which she had carefully and thoughtfully built over the years, to the McNay. Highlights from her bequest appear in a celebratory installation of the 30th anniversary of the Jerry Lawson Print Gallery.
Jerry collected works by the greatest printmakers of the 19th and 20th centuries: Francisco Goya, Jasper Johns, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and Pablo Picasso. Included in the exhibition are all 15 of Picasso’s Saltimbanques (1904–05). These etchings and drypoints about the lives of itinerant acrobats were the first that Picasso made and include his early masterpiece Le Repas Frugal, which beautifully describes a meager dinner of bread and wine shared by two acrobats. Another highlight of the show is a group of prints by Jasper Johns, an artist whom Jerry collected in depth, including his lithographs Decoy and Decoy II, both landmarks in 20th-century American printmaking.
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This exhibition was organized by the McNay Art Museum.
The Elizabeth Huth Coates Exhibition Endowment and the Arthur and Jane Stieren Fund for Exhibitions are generously funding this exhibition.In addition to special exhibitions, the McNay’s collection, comprised of nearly 20,000 works of art, is on view in the museum’s Main Collection Galleries. Please follow the links below to learn more about each part of our collection.
Tobin Collection of Theatre Arts
Cecelia Condit: World
September 4, 2012 ǀ January 27, 2013
Cecelia Condit studied sculpture at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in sculpture from the Philadelphia College of Art, and a Master of Fine Arts in photography from Tyler School of Art. Her work has been shown internationally in museums, galleries, alternative spaces, and festivals, and is represented in many public and private collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; and the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh.In the past 30 years, she has received numerous awards including grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Film Institute, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Wisconsin Arts Board. Condit is currently professor and director of graduate studies in the Department of Film/Video/Animation/New Genres at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
Fiesta, Fête, Festival
Selections from the Tobin Collection
January 16 | June 9, 2013
Fiesta, Fête, Festival moves from San Antonio to Seville, Venice, Versailles, St. Petersburg, and other cities to celebrate some of the world’s great festivals. Scene and costume designs from the Tobin Collection reveal that San Antonio’s own Fiesta—from NIOSA and Charreada to the Coronation of the Queen of the Order of the Alamo and Cornyation—belongs to a rich tradition of popular and court celebrations. The exhibition focuses on festivals in Spain, Italy, and Russia: Feria de Abril, with its flamenco dancers and matadors; pre-Lenten Carnevale, with its masked balls; and Shrovetide Fair and Yarmarka (yearly markets), with their fairground amusements. Full of human drama and local color, festivals inspired modern ballets and operas by Bizet, Ravel, Mussorgsky, Stravinsky, and Verdi. These musical works are brought to life in scene and costume designs by some of the Tobin Collection’s most famous artists, including Léon Bakst, Alexandre Benois, and Natalia Gontcharova. Other showcased treasures from the Tobin Collection are festival books from the 1600s to the 1800s that resonate with Fiesta today. European courts—the Medici, the Bourbons, the Hapsburgs, and the Romanovs—all used elaborate pageantry as tools of domestic politics and international statecraft. Engravings record a river parade on the Arno in Florence, fireworks in the gardens at Versailles, and the coronation of Tsar Alexander II in Kremlin Square. These and other courtly fêtes offer fascinating parallels with San Antonio’s Fiesta events.
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This exhibition was organized by the McNay Art Museum and is a program of the Tobin Theatre Arts Fund.
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