UTSA’s ‘VOZ’ testifies to San Antonio as a Chicano art capital Elaine Ayala Feb. 11, 2018
Arturo Infante Almeida has spent so much of his career as a curator, art dealer and an advocate and promoter of artists, he doesn’t quite know how to soak up attention at an exhibit, even when he has mounted it. He’s usually the guy guiding people in front of a painting he thinks they’ll want to see; sharing back stories of artists and their works; and canvasing the gallery for anything out of place. It’s that eye. It can’t stop working. Over almost two decades, he has helped assemble the University of Texas at San Antonio’s art collection, through acquisitions and donations. It now contains 2,600 works and is reaching the $4 million mark. Almeida has mounted about 200 exhibits. At Centro de Artes at Market Square until June 10, “VOZ: Selections from the UTSA Art Collection” may well represent the pinnacle of a career that started with selling art from his car trunk. At Thursday night’s smashing opening, Almeida looked a little uncomfortable, a little emotional in the spotlight. The 222 pieces by 166 artists —people whose work Almeida knows well, some of whom he has seen emerge to prominence — point to a man who has deeply influenced its scope. Almeida is quick to credit former UTSA president Ricardo Romo, who hired and empowered him. Romo, who retired after a sexual harassment scandal, made art a budget priority. He brought to the university the goal of building an art collection. Almeida, an artist who does photo collages, put the art and artists in front of him, visiting studios, going to shows, talking to artists. He was doing such work long before arriving at UTSA, representing 19 artists. He was running Café Latino, a coffeehouse on North Main Street, where he peddled sandwiches, empanadas and artists. He had traveled to New York and Los Angeles to see how cafes operated as galleries. Romo was a regular. Many of those early artists became part of UTSA’s collection and are vividly represented in VOZ. They’re packed onto Centro’s wall space, as evidence of San Antonio’s status as a Latino art capital in a city central to the U.S. Latino experience.
The history is all there — the farmworkers’ movement; the Chicano movement; Raza Unida; Latina empowerment; family, culture, heritage; the search for identity; the borderlands; the fight for civil rights; and the central role of education in that struggle. In an essay, UTSA scholar John Phillip Santos notes Los Angeles as “that other distant outpost” of these realities. But it’s San Antonio that has become “a capital of what America is becoming.” Almeida took a turn in explaining UTSA’s role in telling this story. “For 300 years, San Antonio has been a place where different languages, customs and traditions have merged to form a unique cultural history…. The work on these walls is informed by pride, joy and a tenacity that reverberates in the voices that celebrate the Latino experience.” Of the exhibition’s 222 works, 94 are by local artists, followed by others from South Texas, California and Mexico. The show contains prints from the Cheech Marín collection; a collection of famous images by Mexican master photographers Manuel Álvarez Bravo and Graciela Iturbide; and prints commissioned by UTSA called the “Veinticinco,” or 25, series. The list of artists in VOZ, Spanish for voice, is a who’s who of the Chicano art world — Treviño, Vargas, Valdez, Rubio, Rodriguez-Díaz, Armendariz, Amado, Ortiz, Rodriguez, Garcia, Rendon, Benavides, Farias, Hinojosa, Baca, Valderas, too many more to name here. Graduate students are beginning to study them, Almeida says, beaming with pride. He still takes students on tours of the collection, installed throughout UTSA’s campuses. The collection now includes the work of UTSA graduates, making it all the more meaningful to the student body. VOZ is the largest exhibit Centro de Artes has hosted so far in its short history at Market Square, and the space has never looked so good. You can see it for free 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday. eayala@express-news.net | Twitter: @ElaineAyala
Elaine Ayala