Although he was born in Bellevue, Ohio, artist Michael Tracy called Texas home for decades and left deep impressions on
an unsuspecting locale: the tiny border town of San Ygnacio.
Best known for richly layered paintings and symbolic sculptures exploring themes of religion, ritual, immigration and sacrifice, Tracy reached the apex of his fame in the 1980s — a fruitful era punctuated by shows at the esteemed New York gallery Mary Boone and the unveiling of his pivotal 1987 exhibition “Terminal Privileges” at the Museum of Modern Art offshoot PS1.
But Tracy’s first-ever museum show took place in San Antonio in 1971 at what was then known as the Marion Koogler McNay Art Institute.
Beginning in the 1990s, Tracy’s priorities shifted away from courting the fickle art world to focus on other projects, including designing furniture in Mexico and jewelry in India and — importantly — preserving historic structures in San Ygnacio, which is billed as “the oldest inhabited town in the USA.”
In November of 2023, McNay Art Museum Director Matthew McLendon and Head of Curatorial Affairs René Paul Barilleaux organized a studio visit with Tracy in San Ygnacio.
“It was Thanksgiving week,” Barilleaux recalled. “Within maybe three hours of being there and meeting him, we said, ‘We have to do a show.’ It felt so right at the moment and we started planning things immediately.”
Those plans began taking shape around the same time that Tracy was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia.
“He knew that this was his swan song,” Michael Tracy Foundation President Christopher Rincón told the Current, referring to both the McNay exhibition and a forthcoming publication due in 2026. Tracy’s diagnosis also affected the content of the exhibition.
“He came to the conclusion that the show needed to be about this other body of work that’s never been exhibited,” Rincón added.
Initiated in the aughts, that body of work is rooted in abstract paintings inspired by the vibrant colors of flowers in Mexico and India. Evoking zinnias and marigolds, these heavily painted canvases are complemented by some of Tracy’s hallmarks — ancient-looking sculptures seemingly designed for a conceptual house of worship — in the posthumous solo show “The Elegy of Distance.” On view at the McNay through July 27, the exhibition encompasses more than 50 objects, including examples of his signature Stations of the Cross series and an altar piece covered in human hair that reportedly sparked gasps from viewers when it was unveiled in Mexico City in 1989.
Making waves
After graduating from St. Edward’s University in Austin in 1964 and earning an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin in 1969, Michael Tracy established residence in Galveston in the early 1970s. While there, he staged Sacrifice I: The Sugar — a ritual designed to raise awareness about worldwide food and wealth inequality. Performed in a warehouse around a pyramid of sugar, the project entailed the piercing of one of Tracy’s paintings — not to mention a doctor wrapping the artist in a full body cast and then cutting him out of it.
While many might file The Sugar under the heading of performance art, Tracy favored the term “action” to describe his multilayered presentations. Puncturing his own paintings remained a theme for Tracy, and his habit of adorning their “wounds” with his own blood fueled early rumors that he was a Satanist.
As art historian and curator E. Luanne McKinnon pointed out in a recent memoriam published by Tragaluz: A Borderland Journal of Arts and Culture, Tracy left Galveston after a fire threatened to destroy his studio in 1978.
“As the lore goes,” McKinnon wrote, “distress about the possibility of his artworks burning up was shared with Jeanne Adams, a well-connected friend from Corpus Christi. She had driven through San Ygnacio on her way home from Nuevo Laredo and suggested the village to him as a possible perfect place in which to realize his epic output.”
While much of his work was conceived and produced in San Ygnacio, few projects made the sort of waves that swelled in the wake of 1990’s The River Pierce: Sacrifice II.
Orchestrated on Good Friday, the “collaborative action” brought 200 artfully dressed outsiders to the quaint town to watch Tracy’s cruciform sculpture Cruz: La Pasión as it was transported via mule-drawn wagon to the banks of the Rio Grande, set afloat and then set on fire by performer Eugenia Vargas — who was draped in magenta silk and smeared with mud.
Other performers, including renowned Mexican artist Abraham Cruz Villegas, were wearing little more than drying mud. Although it was intended to call attention to environmental and socio-political injustices along the Rio Grande, Sacrifice II arguably called more attention to Tracy’s presence in San Ygnacio.
“It was a little terrifying,” Christopher Rincón said. “Imagine 200 people [descending on] a village with a population of 700 … and nobody knows what they’re doing. And then there were reports that they’re burning this huge thing on the river. Even [Tracy] remembered that there were Border Patrol and sheriff’s deputies hiding in the bushes trying to gather intelligence, [thinking] perhaps it’s a security issue — [maybe] they’re creating a distraction here and something else is going to happen down river.”
Among Tracy’s 200 guests was Laredo-born, San Antonio-based artist Ethel Shipton. Invited on board as technical support, Shipton was tasked with helping the performers get into character.
“I was [essentially] smearing mud on naked people,” she recalled with a laugh.
A few years later, Tracy ruffled even more feathers with the release of his 1993 video Xochitl Tlayecouani/Flower Warrior. Staged and shot amid the ruins of Guanajuato, Mexico, it starred performer Yupanqui Aguilar in a homoerotic fantasy featuring Aztec references, elaborate costumes and — as Rincón summed it up — “unabashed male frontal nudity.”
“The premise of the video was this kind of futuristic Lost Boys in the Aztec landscapes of Mexico … post-apocalyptic rituals that had evolved from some kind of nuclear disaster,” Rincón said. “Mad Max meets Georgia O’Keeffe. … [It] was received with great acclaim in San Francisco. [But] his audience in Texas was completely spooked because they saw this as a real departure. … And yet there was a whole generation of these older male patrons — who were gay on the downlow — who were like, ‘Oh, we love it!’ But they were in the minority. … He was tired of having to be this show horse in the gallery world. … At the time, he was dealing with the Whitney Museum of American Art [and] the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. … He decided: I’m going to fold all that up and put it away and never show anyone except the individuals who come to see me.”
Domino effect
“Magnetic” is a word often used to describe Michael Tracy. A fascinating conversationalist who effortlessly shifted from religion and spirituality to architecture and philosophy, Tracy charmed many and delighted in connecting artists with one another. He also acted as something of a mentor to the young artists in his orbit, which stretched from Texas to Mexico.
San Antonio artist Anne Wallace remembers meeting Tracy during his Galveston years.
“I think it was 1977,” Wallace recalled. “My mother helped him find his studio in Galveston, where I grew up. I had studied Spanish literature and I was doing translation of antique documents from Spanish to English and he asked me to translate the catalog for his first show in Mexico City, “Homenaje a Mexico” at Galería Pecanins in 1979. … I translated that catalog and he encouraged me to come down to the opening. It really was life-changing for me to connect with the Mexican art scene through Michael. That opening weekend, I met a whole bunch of artists — some of whom I kept up with for years.”
One of the people Wallace met on that trip was an art collector who invited her to housesit for him outside of Guanajuato.
“I kind of thought, what the hell. … When I was down there, I got a job at the Universidad de Guanajuato and ended up staying six years. So that whole kind of domino effect of working on Michael’s show had a profound impact on me. It was life-changing because out of that, I ended up living in Mexico for all those years, and it changed my view on so many things — about my life, my work, my culture, the U.S., it just gave me a different lens on everything. He had a kind of galvanizing effect.”
Highlighted in the book Groups and Spaces in Mexico, Contemporary Art of the 90s: Vol. 1: Licenciado Verdad, Tracy maintained strong ties to Mexico and rented a studio-residence in a rough-around-the-edges building in Mexico City’s historic downtown. Edited by Patricia Sloane, the book chronicles slices of Tracy’s life there.
I knew no one and didn’t speak Spanish very well and still don’t, but I was madly, convulsively, passionately overwhelmed and in love with Mexico.
As I never had hot water in my apartment I used to go to the Centro bathhouses.
Until 1989, I paid rent for the apartment one year in advance: one million pesos. Later I lent it to Alejandro Diaz, but in the end I gave it to Thomas Glassford who took over in 1990.
Tracy — who amusingly refers to himself as a “gringo pirate” in Licenciado Verdad — not only welcomed Texas artists such as Diaz and Glassford into his Mexico City fold, he created captivating work there, including a series of maroon paintings based on the Aztec ruins of Templo Mayor that he exhibited at Blue Star in 1992.
A seat at the table
Conversations about Michael Tracy’s artwork can quickly evolve into conversations about the legendary dinner parties he orchestrated at his restored 19th-century home in San Ygnacio. Those lucky enough to be invited to one of Tracy’s carefully curated affairs were also privy to his confrontational nature. He notoriously pushed his friends beyond their comfort zones to ascertain what they truly thought and believed. Tracy loved a heated debate — and intended to win. As a result, Tracy’s friendships could wax and wane.
“When you come to San Ignacio, there’s this magical curtain,” Christopher Rincón said. “You drive through the wilderness until you come to a turnoff on Highway 83 and then, all of a sudden, you’re in this landscaped place that’s all platted-out. It feels urban but you’ve been driving through the countryside — so it’s like you’ve gone down a drain and come up in this other world. And then you [arrive at] the Zaragoza Domínguez house — a 19th-century building he restored. … He would have these beautiful dinner parties in this gorgeous space and have candlelight and a fire going. He gave so much attention to detail for the menus and, of course, the wine was excellent. Michael had trained himself to be an excellent cook.”
Cinematic setting aside, what stood out to many were the animated — and often heated — discussions that took place around Tracy’s marble dinner table.
“If you got invited to one of his dinner parties, it was an amazing evening in terms of food and drink and conversation,” Anne Wallace said. “And it sometimes also involved a lot of what Christopher Rincón calls ‘dinner theater.’ It could get very dramatic … and you never really knew what was going to happen.”
“There was always delicious food and lots of wine,” Ethel Shipton echoed. “And sometimes yelling and screaming and arguing — along with laughter and play.”
Virginia Lebermann — who co-founded the influential West Texas gallery Ballroom Marfa and considered Tracy her unofficial godfather — entered Tracy’s orbit early in life.
“I met him when I was very young because he and my mother were friends,” Lebermann said. “I was at many of his dinner parties at the Zaragoza Domínguez house. And that table, the conversations and the passion, it’s just wild — everything that I learned around that table. … My mother called him the morning after a dinner party that she had missed. And she asked, ‘What happened? How did it go?’ And he said, ‘Oh, we’re still just wiping up the blood off the table.’”
Michael Tracy’s legacy
In a passage from Licenciado Verdad, Tracy wrote, “[I] am back in San Ygnacio, where I have been doing what I started in 1990: creating a space meant to expand San Ygnacio as a National Historic Landmark.”
Organized under the umbrella of the River Pierce Foundation, Tracy’s efforts originally entailed an artist residency program that would create cross-cultural dialogue between the U.S. borderlands and Latin America. Inspired by his profound interest in challenging the concept of borders — especially ones governed by water — and the stories he heard firsthand from undocumented immigrants crossing through San Ygnacio, Tracy’s foundation began to evolve.
“He wanted the River Pierce Foundation to take this part of the Rio Grande and use it to sustain life and give freedom and empowerment to not only the migrants who were coming through here with their stories of hardship, but also the artists and the citizens who were witnessing [these injustices],” Christopher Rincón explained. “In 1997, the oldest building in San Ygnacio — the Treviño-Uribe Rancho — became a National Historic Landmark. … All of the other historic villages and settlements — on both sides of the Rio Grande — were relocated, except for San Ygnacio.
“And this collection of 33 historic buildings are the last of their kind in the United States. And even though it points to these colonial origins, there’s a whole other aspect of understanding the indigenous people who were here before: the Esto’k Gna, or Carrizo/Comecrudo. This is one of the most ancient peoples in this part of the world. … A private individual came to Michael and said, ‘I’ve acquired the most important buildings from my family. I’m turning 75 and I don’t have the energy to sustain this historic architecture. I want the River Pierce Foundation to buy them, because [it] has the ability to raise money and do the historic preservation.”
The River Pierce Foundation now owns seven historic buildings in San Ygnacio — including the Treviño-Uribe Rancho, a fort constructed in 1830.
Sharing her thoughts about Tracy in Tragaluz magazine, Rio Grande International Study Center Executive Director Tricia Cortez wrote, “Michael Tracy’s legacy was one of uplifting the historic and precious community of San Ygnacio. He elevated San Ygnacio’s profile through his creation of the River Pierce Foundation and by restoring the fort and other historic buildings. … I worked with him during our struggle to prevent the confiscation of vast swaths of public and private lands by the deeds to construct the Border Wall. His efforts put San Ygnacio on the map. Our coalition was able to save 71 river miles in Webb and Zapata counties from destruction.”
Although still undergoing restoration, the River Pierce Foundation’s Treviño-Uribe
Rancho welcomes visitors on the first Sunday of the month between the hours of noon and 5 p.m. But Tracy’s vast network of friends and fans are rightfully more excited
by the promise of what’s to become of his storied homestead, the Zaragoza Domínguez house, now under the guidance of his unofficial goddaughter Virginia Lebermann.
“What Michael and I talked about was a residency program — [focusing on] poetry and music, things that really interested him,” Lebermann said. “His studio at the Zaragoza Domínguez house, we talked about it as an exhibition space — it’s tiny, but you could do really beautiful, small exhibitions in there. Those are ideas that we threw around. Certainly nothing is clear just yet, but those are some ideas that he had. And to keep that space alive.
“I don’t know how we could ever keep those dinner conversations as thunderous as they used to be, but we could try. … All of the passion around the table, the passion about bringing artists and filmmakers and musicians together, the importance of creativity, the importance of cross-cultural conversation, the importance of borders — all of that was his influence on me. … I miss him terribly. My gosh, the world got so much more milquetoast without him in it.”
‘Michael Tracy: The Elegy of Distance’
$10-$20, 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Wednesday, 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Thursday, 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Friday, 10 a.m-5 p.m. Saturday noon-5 p.m. Sun through July 27, McNay Art Museum, 6000 N. New Braunfels Ave., (210) 824-5368, mcnayart.org.
Subscribe to SA Current newsletters.
Follow us: Apple News | Google News | NewsBreak | Reddit | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter| Or sign up for our RSS Feed
Related Stories
Cultural Adjuster: Talking with Rolando Briseño as his 50-year retrospective show winds down
San Antonio artist and Spare Parts founder Mary Elizabeth Cantú has died
San Antonio artist John Picacio teams with best-selling author on Día de Muertos-themed kids’ book
Kickoff for San Antonio’s Contemporary Art Month will feature exhibition dedicated to ‘sad rock’
San Antonio’s cactusBARN space presenting two solo exhibitions for CAM 2025
San Antonio native Fidel Ruiz-Healy screening TV pilot Stars Diner at SXSW
Latinx playwright Octavio Solis will present San Antonio lecture on memory in relation to love, art and identity
San Antonio’s McNay Art Museum offering gallery talk on photography as performance
This article appears in Feb 19-25, 2025.