The foursome of exhibitions currently on view at Blue Star Contemporary Art Museum is the most cohesive set of shows I’ve seen there in a very long time. This is exciting for many reasons. For one, through this project the museum is heralding San Antonio as part of the greater Latin world in ways large and small, re-mapping and re-contextualizing our place. But it starts by taking the viewer right out of where they are.
Based around the boundaries of printmaking, the Mary Heathcott-curated “Spatial Planes” is a slick, sophisticated, funny and spiky experience. The program accompanying it opens with what seems to be a new origin story/mission statement for Blue Star:
“Developed from a grassroots event in July of 1986, Blue Star Contemporary Art Museum is the first and longest-running venue for contemporary art in San Antonio. Blue Star as an exhibition space arose from the need to provide a platform for the work and ideas of local contemporary artists. In the years since its inception, Blue Star has grown with the community, instigating positive change in both the art community and the community at large.
“Now in its 28th year, Blue Star continues to be an incubator for contemporary art in San Antonio, hosting over 20 exhibitions each year within its four onsite galleries and multiple off-site locations within the community. These exhibitions feature both emerging and world-renowned artists who hail both from the Alamo City and across the globe. Over 300,000 visitors each year experience contemporary art at Blue Star through exhibitions, the MOSAIC after-school education program, and community events, which is why we at Blue Star stand firm in our commitment to inspire the creative genius in us all.”
It’s an impassioned, specific, contextualizing and democratic statement of intent. And it seems to illustrate what this quartet of shows is all about.
Among the local and regional talents Heathcott has curated for “Spatial Planes” is Angela Fox, who primarily works in gouache. Fox is an adjunct faculty member at the University of the Incarnate Word and San Antonio College, and received her Bachelor of Arts from UIW in 2004. I first encountered her work as part of the Texas Biennial in 2009 and was struck then by her potent mythology. In Fox’s flattened, pointy geometric world, bundled humanoid shapes, rendered cartoonish in their pointed hoodies and black leggings, lurk or gesticulate at odd angles. Fox refers to her characters as “tightly knit gangs,” which she explains have a tendency to “hang out and to drink beer while gathering supplies, slaying serpents and establishing camps—embarking on adventures of survival, creation and destruction.”
It’s bewitching stuff with an itchy, subconscious potency, like cool illustrations from the book you read when you were six and can barely remember, but you do Google image searches anyway, just to catch another glimpse.
And while Yuko Fukuzumi is originally from Yokohama, Japan, she studied in the U.S. at San Antonio College and completed her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at Texas State University. (Importantly, several of the “Spatial Planes” contributors are linked by Texas State, which exemplifies that university’s under-appreciated excellence.) Her series of 81 “cards,” each of them layered with sticky origami paper, is called Just Me Love Me, and is an expression of her “last appreciation for the relationship,” a kind of dénouement of a monogamous romance. One that happened hereabouts, apparently; in her statement, she says “during the exhibition viewers who know me or him personally may ask museum staff for ‘a piece of my heart.’ The piece is a souvenir from this pivotal moment of my life, one each person may choose to do with whatever they want. The space the piece once occupied will remain empty on the wall for the remainder of the exhibition.”
Each card calls to mind the harmonious color and pattern typical to origami, but out of each image, one can Rorschach out songbirds, landforms, dancers and other fractured accoutrements of love. More than prints, they are poetry.
In the Middle Gallery, the Blue Star mission statement is accomplished via the work of Fernando Andrade, said by some to be the heir to Vincent Valdez in the precision of his graphite approach to a complex conundrum: the origins of human violence and the generalized and touristic violence found currently along our border with Mexico. His series of drawings, titled Tierra y Libertad, is a material response to the disappearance of one of Andrade’s close friends due to drug cartel violence. He studied at San Antonio College and volunteered in numerous Westside mural projects. His individual work is delicate, disturbing and technically accomplished. In a contemporary art era in which the mythos and pathos of the border drug wars can seem rote and even preachy, he stays so close to lived experience it’s well-nigh impossible to walk away unfazed. Maybe even more than Vincent Valdez, Andrade’s ethos recalls the French film The Rules of the Game, in which children reeling from the effects of the World War II enact elaborate funerals and graveyards for fallen animals.
“Del Corazón,” a show of paintings by Joe Lopez, is curated by former Executive Director Bill FitzGibbons. Lopez is justly famous for both his Gallista Gallery and for the characteristic set of symbols he sets himself, including the ever-present rooster. Lopez was named after boxer Joe Louis and was born without one hand. This is all part of his mythos; how he transcends it here, though, is to set himself as a field reporter as opposed to a character. Lopez breaks new ground in “Del Corazón,” documenting migrant life and labor. Lopez’s “camera” pauses to collect a smile here, a stroke there. It is baldly folkloric without a hint of kitsch. Also interesting, this set of roosters is larger, grander, more grotesque and more ambiguous than others I’ve seen. It’s as though he is acknowledging that within the beautiful masculinity, all the plumage and shining eyes, there’s something a little odd, a little off, a little broken. One of the rooster’s wattles are obviously human testicles, grossly witty and poignant.
The curatorial statement for “Spatial Planes” includes this utterance: “The artist’s representation of dimensional space as evolved over centuries and styles, shifting from accurate representation of the physical world, to obstructing it, to conceptualizing it.”
Conceptualizing the hell out of the physical world is “Northern Triangle,” an enormous, nearly overwhelming visual compendium of original photographs, archival research materials and artifacts in the Project Space. Think maps, timelines, news footage. Also think Punch magazine cartooning and video screens of American network news coverage of the seemingly interminable civil wars in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala.
One of show’s signal points: that the place we are now, as a country and a region, is currently under the sway of past American foreign policy in Central America and its current repercussions.
You see this in the original photographs by Mark Menjivar, himself born in El Salvador, now an American photographer and academic. He travels each year back to El Salvador, and documents some of the places and people central to the Central American experience of the 1970s and ’80s. There are gorgeous travel photographs—but of graves, of abandoned weaponry depots, of the entrances of caves where people hid in fear for their lives.
Close by, on the same wall, accounts of the Central American violence from the San Antonio Light newspaper remind us that here in this city, we were maybe more intimately aware than we now remember. “Northern Triangle” is said to address the humanitarian crisis, ongoing, of the “nearly 68,000 unaccompanied children who have been apprehended on the U.S.-Mexico border.” The undertaking has been assembled and installed by Borderland Collective, led by Jason Reed, Mark Menjivar and Erina Duganne. Contributing artists include Adriana Corral, Noah Sadowski, Vincent Valdez, Jennifer Whitney and Ricky Yanas.
It’s a challenge to describe the physical layout and the impact of “Northern Triangle.” If this helps give you a sense, it took over 60 hours to install. And while it’s made up of diverse materials, it’s hung together so beautifully and with such respect to variety and composition that it appears as a collage, which opens up into further collages as you move through the space. After the initial ka-pow, graphic-novel-like impact, “Northern Triangle” guides you on a kaleidoscopic view of human history, where the U.S. involvement in Central American history stands in for the border contexts and conflicts worldwide.
Art historian/collaborator Erinna Duganne has written an excellent contextualizing wall text to the left as you walk in. Her initial art-historical impulse was to present multiple small wall texts: plaques, stickers, written explanations for more of the exhibited material. But along with Reed and Menjivar, they decided to allow the posters and magazines to emerge as design and art elements whose meaning is as much derived by viewer experience as by straight historical narration (though a very good timeline of 20th-century Central American history is on display, as well).
For this reason, it’s hard to give particular weight to any one element, although upon walking in your eyes may be drawn to Menjivar’s beautiful large-scale photographs, or to the water barrel in the front right corner. There are many points of entry, it functions as a kind of puzzle. Not one with a definite starting and endpoint, but a series of signs and symbols you were given the tools to interpret.
A case in point: a cluster of printed copies of original Vincent Valdez drawings, taken from police photographs of actual desaparecidos. Valdez tunes his exquisite portraiture to render the faces of those never seen alive by their families again. Some faces express pain, outrage or paralyzingly trauma. It’s like a graphic novel version of the elders of The Burghers of Calais. One drawing is left unfinished. It’s as though the artist simply couldn’t bear to finish the last markings on this person gone, beloved, unexplained. This is one of the exhibition’s many strengths, it rakes over an ever-so-recent series of atrocities and doesn’t let us forget where they came from. The crisis in Central America is not merely erupted but built, as all crises are, of ongoing policies of ignorance and brutality. No one is immune. Not even you. Nor does this installation present itself as the final word on anything. You get the sense of a host of narratives unfolding and connections being made. The artists hope that the show will travel, and I hope it does. The artists intend that the work should grow and continue to evolve, and I think it will engender new work. Possibly not only by these artists, but by others now implicated and inspired by its magnitude.
To that end, there are several events planned around this exhibition. On January 8 (6:30-8:30 p.m.), Blue Star will screen Granito: How to Nail a Dictator, a documentary that delves into the civil war in Guatemala. There will also be a “Northern Triangle” panel discussion, moderated by Duganne, featuring activists Yvonne Dilling, Allan Pogue and Graciela Sanchez of the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center on January 22 (6-8 p.m.). This seeks to historicize the current Central American refugee crisis, and to talk about the often-overlooked 1980s peace activism in the U.S.
Heathcott seems to be re-taking an institution whose mission always seemed uncertain beyond spotlighting local and regional artists, while hosting sometimes irrelevant shows. Due to this conceptual drift, as often as not, the different elements in the four included galleries proved distractingly disconnected. Less than a year after Heathcott’s arrival, Blue Star emerges as a multifarious but coherent space with clear principles and confident curation. A polished print exhibition pushes design boundaries and innovative materiality, while a passionate project ignites what promises to be a boldly experimental resource, reflecting Heathcott’s former role at Artpace, where she initiated the Window Works program.
There’s another way in which Heathcott’s orchestration of these shows reveals her Artpace bones, in a good way. The four shows are explosive and diverse statements which refract and intensify a unifying curatorial theme. The compositional strength and visual playfulness of “Spatial Planes” stands in a kind of art world contrast to Andrade’s work. While in the Project Space, much like the Hudson (Show)Room at Artpace, wild experimentation promises more work to come.
Spatial Planes; Tierra y Libertad; Del Corazón; Northern Triangle
$3-$5, noon-8pm Thu, noon-6pm Fri-Sun, Blue Star Contemporary Art Museum, 116 Blue Star, (210) 227-6960, bluestarart.org
This article appears in Dec 17-23, 2014.