Columns

TruthBeauty at the McNay

By Sarah Fisch

Published: 2/3/2010

Types: Cover Story, Second Story

Before I meandered through the traveling photo exhibition TruthBeauty with Daniela Oliver, the McNay’s PR Manager, I had zero idea what Pictorialism was. Had you asked me before last Thursday, I would’ve guessed it had something to do with cave painting. And it does. Just kidding. Well, e...[MORE]

Positive space: Louis Vega Treviño's new show is all heart

By Sarah Fisch

Published: 1/27/2010

Types: Cover Story, Section Cover

I’m tempted to talk about the long, narrow corridor at the Southwest School of Art and Craft’s Ursuline Hall Gallery as a metaphoric space: THE CORRIDOR as LIFE, human existence as a transient journey headed in a linear way toward … I think it’s a staircase, in the case of this hall. The image feels...[MORE]

Easing into 2010: Fl!ght keeps it casual

By Chad Dawkins

Published: 1/13/2010

Types: The Arts, Art, Visual Arts

Let’s start off the new year with a bang. Or alternatively, we could just ease into it. That would be more casual, so the show 2010 at Fl!ght Gallery goes that route. Showcasing individual works by 20 local artists is pretty standard fare, and based on the work presented, the new year should look pr...[MORE]

Not just another roadside attraction: World's biggest cowboy boots turn 30

By Sarah Fisch

Published: 1/13/2010

Types: Cover Story, Section Cover

According to TxDOT, every day an estimated 182,000 cars pass by Bob “Daddy-O” Wade’s “Giant Justins” sculpture in front of North Star Mall. When I explained to the TxDOT public-relations employee why I wanted to know, she gasped, “Oh, I love those boots!” Whether you grew up right here in SATX ...[MORE]

First* Friday preview: *OK, maybe Second Friday

By Sarah Fisch

Published: 1/6/2010

Types: The Arts, Art

Holy arbitrary calendrical shenanigans, you guys, it’s actually 2010 right the hell now! Dig us, we’re living in the future. Also: This coming Friday marks the first First Friday of the new decade. Yet it won’t be the first actual Friday, which was New Year’s Day — it would’ve been difficult to get ...[MORE]

A quinceañera, 15 years late: From the department of reclaimed traditions

By Natalia Ciolko

Published: 12/22/2009

Types: Cover Story, Section Cover

The quinceañera, that wedding-like extravaganza marking a girl’s passage into womanhood, is more than a tradition. It’s an obsession. For one day, an average teenage girl becomes a princess. So what happens when five grown women decide to reclaim their lost quinceañeras — still childless and un...[MORE]

Human pyramid: Some animal (trainers) are more equal than others; welcome to the circus-folk hierarchy

By Sarah Fisch

Published: 12/16/2009

Types: The Arts

Think the circus was a utopia of outsiders? Not hardly; a strict caste system was enforced in virtually every circus whose history is known. And as in Reaganomics, interaction tended to trickle only downward. Top of the Big Top The circus owner, natch, who — despite various fictional dep...[MORE]

Lives of the saints: Your guide to circus culture's (fallen) angels

By Sarah Fisch

Published: 12/16/2009

Types: Cover Story

I think of it as an anthropological exhibition,” Marise McDermott, president of the Witte Museum, says. “[Circus Folk] is less about the phenomenon of the circus from an audience’s vantage point, and more about the culture surrounding the circus, the people who actually made the circus happen, from ...[MORE]

Swords into pulp shared: 'Engaged & Fragmented' at the Southwest School of Art & Craft

By Sarah Fisch

Published: 12/9/2009

Types: Cover Story, Section Cover

The Southwest School of Art & Craft, under the curatorial eye of Kathy Armstrong, has assembled a varied and haunting multipart show that unites art of social protest and the material and metaphor of paper pulp in an unsettling mash-up of war images. Central to the show is the participation of t...[MORE]

Gary Sweeney: He's got a million of 'em: Sarah Fisch's Q&A with Gary Sweeney

By Sarah Fisch

Published: 11/25/2009

Types: Cover Story, Second Story

So the house of cards idea, how’d that evolve?   These are pretty tenuous, set up here. When Hills [Snyder, curator at Sala Diaz] approached me…you know, I’d aways thought “if I had a show here, I’d do this,” then three months later you go, “No, no, I’d do this!” So you get all these...[MORE]

Gary Sweeney:Good Humor Man: Welcome to Gary Sweeney's (tragi-)comic universe

By Sarah Fisch

Published: 11/25/2009

Types: Cover Story, Second Story

Artist Gary Sweeney, a California transplant with an unshakable beach-bum ease and glow, is one of San Antonio’s ambassadors to the outside world. His “Nostalgia, Texas” series of billboards abuts the parking garage at San Antonio International Airport, where it beckons visitors and locals with glow...[MORE]

Opening preview: Artpace AIR 9.3: Opening preview: Artpace AIR 9.3

By Sarah Fisch

Published: 11/18/2009

Types: The Arts, Art, Visual Arts

I was already pre-psyched to see the output of the current three artists in residence at Artpace: Adrian Esparza and Mario Ybarra Jr. represented in Phantom Sightings: Art After the Chicano Movement, Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s phenomenal traveling exhibition, which stopped at the Alameda thi...[MORE]

El Veterano: Andale, Already: 5 reasons why Jesse Trevino's career retrospective at the Alameda matters more than you think

By Sarah Fisch

Published: 11/11/2009

Types: The Arts

1. Pioneer: *Pioneer: Jesse Treviño is one of the few Chicano artists whose work was acquired by the Smithsonian Institution, and arguably the first San Antonio hometown artist whose work gained international prominence. 2.Founding Father: He acts as a crucial branch of the San Anto paint...[MORE]

El Veterano: Mr. Trevino's Neighborhood: Any day of the week, you can find his work on the street

By Sarah Fisch

Published: 11/11/2009

Types: Cover Story, Second Story

“La Historia Chicana,” Our Lady of the Lake University (1974) 411 SW 24th St., Our Lady of the Lake campus, Sueltenfuss Library  This majestic wall mural encircling the Sueltenfuss Library is generally acknowledged to be the first grand-scale work executed by Treviño after the loss of...[MORE]

El Veterano: The duke of Kelly Field: Anatomy of a painting

By Sarah Fisch

Published: 11/11/2009

Types: Cover Story

Jesse Treviño’s ouevre is puro San Anto landscape, no matter who you are; as a kid I absorbed posters of “La Raspa” in the Blanco Café alongside the sexy wall mural of the Aztec warrior carrying the princess, and the faux-wood sign reading “you don’t have to be crazy to work here, but it helps.” I l...[MORE]

Sins of the Flesh: Visual vespers at SAMA

By Elaine Wolff

Published: 11/4/2009

Types: Cover Story, Section Cover

It’s an intensely graphic month at the San Antonio Museum of Art, where antique suppurating martyrs are countered by modern meat, splayed, ground, stacked, and photographed for consumption. I’m a fan of the bacon, but most of the subjects of David Halliday’s still-life photographs are actually...[MORE]

Reclaimed:Paintings from the Jacques Goudstikker Collection: Lost & Found: a timeline of Jacques Goudstikker and his collection

By Sarah Fisch

Published: 10/7/2009

Types: The Arts

1897 Jacques Goudstikker is born in Amsterdam, into the third generation of a Jewish family of prosperous, influential art dealers. 1914-1918(approximately) Jacques studies at the Commercial School in Amsterdam, as well as with noted art historian Wilhelm Martin at Utrecht. 1919 Jacques j...[MORE]

Reclaimed:Paintings from the Jacques Goudstikker Collection: Unforgettable

By Sarah Fisch

Published: 10/7/2009

Types: The Arts

Marge Gregerman views the exhibition of Jacques Goudstikker’s collection at the McNay through two lenses. “As a docent at the McNay, this is an exemplary exhibit of 17th-century Dutch art, which [San Antonio does not] have. As art for art’s sake, it’s a wonderful contribution towards understan...[MORE]