"Alberto Mijangos: 159"

Comprising 96 artworks gathered from private and institutional collections, the retrospective “Alberto Mijangos: 159” spotlights a revered painter who was born in Mexico City but made San Antonio home and left deep impressions on our art community as an educator and gallery director. Organized by San Antonio’s Department of Arts and Culture and curated by Dr. Teresa Eckmann in observance of the Tricentennial, the exhibition draws its title from a number that held symbolic meaning for Mijangos — 1 signaling the beginning, 5 referencing the middle and 9 representing the end of his artistic career. With those milestones as a framework, “159” lays out various chapters in Mijangos’ life, from studies at Mexico’s Academia de San Carlos and the Art Institute of Chicago to his arrival in San Antonio, his acquisition of a resident’s visa and appointment as director of what’s now the Mexican Cultural Institute. During his determined pursuit of the American Dream (which involved several deportations), Mijangos experimented with an array of genres and styles, including traditional portraiture and densely textured figurative abstraction. Among the highlights included in “159” are his amusing odes to Édouard Manet’s 1863 icon Olympia and multiple series inspired by flags, T-shirts and underwear (don’t miss his painting Jasper Johns’ Chones from 2001). Taken as a whole, the impressive show goes above and beyond its mission to “uncover for a broad audience the hidden treasure that is Alberto Mijangos’ oeuvre.