Arts Alive San Antonio

By JASMINA WELLINGHOFF, Editor

Houston native, Emily Ballew Neff, still remembers her first visit to San Antonio about 30 years ago. On that occasion she visited the exhibition Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries, presented by the San Antonio Museum of Art.

“That exhibition was such a knockout, and it was a very important experience for me,” said Neff in a recent interview.

Today, she is the new director of that same museum that impressed her so long ago.

“I am a native Texan, from Houston, and I have known San Antonio my entire life. I was always aware of SAMA. So, what attracted me to this job is not only the extraordinary collection but also, what I call, the DNA of the institution. The staff is fantastic, the board is very smart, dedicated and committed to SAMA. I love the personality of the place. There’s probably no other place in the country where an old brewery has been converted into an accredited art museum, so there’s a lot of character here. And quite honestly, I am very glad to be repatriated to Texas.”

She considers SAMA’s location and history as major assets.

“The San Antonio River, or Yanaguana, is why we are all here. San Antonio would not exist as we know it without the river,” she said. “I and the board, and staff, are interested in strengthening that sense of place for the institution.”

But ultimately, a museum is judged by its art collection and the ways it connects it to the community. People can visit SAMA and be exposed to art from across the world, she pointed out, from antiquity to contemporary works. In between, they can see an exceptionally strong Latin American collection and a rich Asian Art section, American and European art, and new works of today, collectively covering 5000 years of human creativity. The antiquity collection is the most comprehensive in the state of Texas, and the Asian collection is ranked nationally as one of the greatest collections of Asian art in the U.S. In addition, the Latin American collection is also unique as it includes both the Rockefeller and the Robert Winn collections.

“So, if you want to know what it means to be human across time and place, SAMA is the place to visit,” said Neff.

Before coming to San Antonio, Neff served as the executive director of the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, where one of her accomplishments was to spearhead the effort to relocate the museum to downtown Memphis, to enhance its visibility in the city’s center. She started her curatorial career at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, where she was the founding curator of American painting and sculpture. In that capacity, Neff organized twenty exhibitions, grew the museum’s collections by more than 30 percent and helped create a patron support group.

“The Memphis Museum is an absolute gem, older than SAMA; it’s 100 years old, but it’s half the size of SAMA, though size is not everything, she said. “What made a difference for me is that Texas is kind of a juggernaut when it comes to art museums. I would say, that Tennessee has a handful of wonderful museums but it’s an apples-versus-oranges comparison. I am not sure whether the people of Texas understand just how important the Texas art community is. Fantastic, world renown artists have come from Texas; we have art schools, we have art museums, we have arts supporters. We have an infrastructure for the visual arts that is way more advanced and more sophisticated than counterparts in other states of the union. Texas is right there at the top with New York and California. I wish more people, more San Antonians knew that.”

She sees it as her job to help that happen by opening the doors and broadening accessibility throughout the region.

So, what is her vision for SAMA?

“I recognize that San Antonio is a very special place, very distinctive and unique, so the last thing I want to do is impose my own ideas. I will say, though, that we will be looking for ways to build upon the building blocks that are already in place: our connections to the world, our connections to the river, our connection to history through the Lone Star Brewery. We will look at how our programs connect through those very fundamental things.”

As for her favorite gallery to hang out in, she mentioned the American art space, which is small but “mighty.”

To close our conversation, she evoked the history of art museums which started as luxuries for royalty and the aristocracy, but eventually evolved into public institutions for everyone. The Paris Louvre was the first public museum.

“What the French revolutionaries did was radical,” she noted. “They did not destroy the art. They said, ‘what once belonged to the kings, will now belong to the French people.’ We are still trying to fully deliver on that promise.”
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San Antonio Museum of Art, 200 W. Jones Ave., 210-978-8140; www.samuseum.org