Museum in San Antonio: Slideshow

The McNay is easily San Antonio’s most beautiful museum, and although the average guest’s age at the annual galas hovers near August temps, view this not as a problem, but an opportunity. Get your friends in on the ground floor now, and y’all could be running the board in a decade. The original building, the barely modified 1920s Spanish Colonial Revival home of its namesake heiress and arts patron, and the new Jean-Paul Viguier-designed addition, sit on 23 acres of sculpture-dotted rolling green in the heart of Alamo Heights/Terrell Hills. Modern masterpieces by the greats, from Gauguin to Renoir to O’Keeffe (and including a significant Picasso collage) are still the heart of the collection, but the sharp eye of Chief Curator Rene Barilleaux is shaping the growing post World War II collection to fit the light-filled new wing. The McNay also has a notable collection of works on paper, including prints by Goya, Picasso, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Jasper Johns, and an outstanding theater-arts collection and library.

SAMA is San Antonio’s requisite “encyclopedic” museum, but under its most recent leadership it has concentrated its efforts in some particularly enticing areas — early Asian artifacts, including some rare and exceptional pottery; Latin-American art; and a redo of its Greek and Roman galleries to better show off the sculpture — and thanks to the recently endowed chair for modern and contemporary art, curator David Rubin is bringing the museum solidly into the 20th century The Lenora and Walter F. Brown Asian wing is an airy, contemporary complement to the historic Lone Star Brewery building that houses the other collections. The addition of a café run by Damien Watel overlooking the new Museum Reach of the River Walk — from which you can easily walk to the Pearl Brewery or downtown — makes it a day-trip-worthy destination.