Arts Alive San Antonio

By SUSAN YERKES, Contributing Writer

This summer, a drab concrete passage off Broadway sprouted bright plumage and emerged as a happening hotspot. Thanks to Centro San Antonio’s Art Everywhere program, Peacock Alley became a perfect example of the transformative power of art. The artist known as Scotch! created a lively pastiche of color on the walls with his mural “Fly with the Peacocks,” and the Centro team planned cool pop-up events, with live music, deejays, dance and refreshments to draw visitors and locals downtown to relax and enjoy the vibe. 

“It’s all about preforming lines and abstract shapes and colors with design elements,” explained the artist. The project took about three weeks overall to finish, and the artist’s wife and friends occasionally pitched in to help.

How does it feel to enjoy the completed work?

“It’s amazing,” he said. “I have a lot of history in that alley — it has a great ledge for skate boarding, and my friends and I have ridden there a lot. It was a great opportunity, and it was huge for me having my friends that ride that alley with me see me paint this. I think my mural on the wall has this welcoming vibe.”

Murals are popping all over San Antonio, and the center city is a great place to begin enjoying them. The walls of downtown are rapidly becoming a vast “library” where citizens and visitors can learn about the city’s history and colorful diversity. While street art and graffiti were once considered public nuisances, there’s today a growing trend in cities across the country to embrace murals as meaningful enhancements of the urban space. “Creative placemaking” is the new buzzword used to describe these projects.

Murals have several advantages over traditional 3-D works such as sculptures and monuments. They can be completed fairly quickly, they are relatively cost-effective compared to 3-D works, and they can be painted over if need be. Numerous studies have shown that public art is an effective economic generator, raising business profiles and profits while also building a sense of community and creating jobs for local artists.

Many of the downtown murals were created under the auspices of the San Antonio Street Art Initiative,  a non-profit dedicated to mural creation and artist advocacy education, founded by street artist and gallery owner Shek Vega.  Launched in 2018, the organization’s “Largest Outdoor Gallery in Texas” project involves several locations, including a collaborative collection of works by 16 local artists painted on the concrete support pillars under the highway at St. Mary’s Street and Quincy, and a nearby 20-mural project on walls of buildings in a 13-block span of North St. Mary’s Street. This spring, Pabst Brewing Company, which moved its headquarters to San Antonio last year, worked with SASAI to sponsor a series of 10 murals along a two-mile stretch from River North and the San Antonio Museum of Art to Pabst’s new art gallery, PBR Studios, in Southtown. Artists Gary Sweeney, Connie Chapa, Angela Fox, Los Otros (Vega and his partner Nick Soupe) and six others painted the murals in record time.

“It’s a crazy time for us,” Vega’s partner Burgundy Woods said. “The growth and demand for what we do is so vast. In a 24-month period we have created 61 murals and advocated career development for 45 artists. I only anticipate more artistic growth.” Woods said SASAI is currently planning an “enormous” new mural project at the Pearl to be announced this fall.

Back in 1993, when the urban mural revolution was in its early stages, youth advocates and artists Cruz Ortiz, Juan Miguel Ramos and the late Manny Castillo, founded San Anto Cultural Arts, a non-profit aimed at involving inner city kids, primarily in a disadvantaged area of the West Side. Working with professional artists, San Anto’s participants have created dozens of murals. The program won national recognition and helped fuel awareness of locally-created murals as legitimate public art. Currently, San Anto is working with the City of San Antonio’s Department of Arts and Culture on a major mural project for Market Square.

“It will be very prominent – it will look like a gateway piece,” said department director Debbie Racca-Sittre. “We want to showcase the area’s history so people can understand about things like the Chili Queens, the role of Latino culture and women. San Anto Cultural Arts is one of our grant-funded agencies – we work with them a lot. They have a very good process of working with the community. We are meeting with stakeholders in the area – neighbors and tenants, to determine the themes they want to see.

“As a department we usually coordinate public art projects with people adjacent to the area through  city councilmembers’ district offices. Downtown is a little different, however; we’re working mostly with business owners rather than neighborhood residents. And downtown is for everybody.”

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The most famous murals in downtown San Antonio are probably those on the Convention Center, commissioned for HemisFair ’68. The outward-facing pieces on either side of the river basin – Juan O’Gorman’s epic “Confluence of Civilizations” and Carlos Merida’s “Rhythm” – are classic, ageless art.  More recently, the developers of the “The 68,”, an eight-story apartment building in Hemisfair, commissioned Barcelona artist Ruben Sánchez to create a modernistic mural titled “CommUNITY” on the concrete sidewall of the attached parking structure, which looks out over Hemisfair grounds. And San Antonio’s Alex Rubio worked with Blue Star student artists to create “Yanaguana” the first piece for the park’s changeable Art Wall in Hemisfair’s Yanaguana Park.

Asked to pick a favorite mural, Racca-Sittre starts with the classics.

“There are so many different styles, it’s impossible to choose just one. But it’s really hard not to love those old 1968 murals – they have such a rich history,” she said. “And now, knowing the artists and where they’re coming from, we are experiencing such a community response, you can’t help but fall in love with every one of them.”

The Department of Arts & Culture has more in store for downtown.

“Another new commission we recently did is with Kathy Sosa,” Racca-Sittre said. “She is going to be working on a mural in Maverick Plaza, in La Villita, where Johnny Hernandez is going to put his new restaurant. We have to wait until more construction is done on the buildings in that area, but we’re going to have a blank wall in the plaza that will have Kathy’s mural on it. We’re also going to partner with UTSA on their new Data Center along San Pedro Creek across from our building on Dolorosa. Our public art team is partnering with UTSA to guide the process.  They’re going to have a couple of murals – one on the creek side, and one on the Dolorosa side that will be the front of the building. We’re still working on the partnership agreement with UTSA at this time.”

In addition, in late July, San Pedro Creek Culture Park Curator, Carrie Brown, and Bexar County officials announced that Sosa and her husband Lionel will create a five-panel mural on the block-long stretch of the linear park that runs from Commerce Street to Dolorosa, illustrating the history and cultural contexts of the creek. The Sosas are painting the panels which will later be enhanced in size using photography, and then turned over to tile fabricators to create the full-scale images on fire-glazed tile designed to withstand the occasional flooding of the creek. The timeline is quick – the Sosas estimate the murals will be ready for their public debut next spring. While Bexar County is taking the lead on that, Racca-Stille notes that the city will end up owning the project, since the city owns the creek property.

City-funded arts projects have some limitations, Racca-Stille noted.

“The city can’t spend our money on projects on private property – it has to be city-owned property.”  The planning process takes time, with various departments coordinating work and approving designs. And city-funded projects must be permanent.

“We can’t create a mural that’s going to be painted over in five years, so that kind of limits us,” she said.

Centro San Antonio, which was created to revitalize and promote downtown, has fewer limitations, and the organization’s already mentioned Art Everywhere program is generating a host of new mural projects working with private business owners and the city. Centro’s Vice President of Cultural Placemaking, Andi Rodriguez, is taking the lead on Art Everywhere. Rodriguez has been involved with the local arts scene for decades, and she brings joyful enthusiasm to the work. “21 in 21, is our initiative for the year, and I think we are going to make that goal” Rodriguez said.

The program’s first mural was Kathy Sosa’s “Keep Calm Y Dream On” on La Boulangerie on Broadway, and Suzy Gonzalez created “Touch” just a block or so up the street, a bright street-level mural celebrating unity on the wall of Herweck’s Art Supply.

“It was painted by hand, even though it may appear to be stencil and spray paint,” Gonzalez said. “I created a digital rendition, matched the colors with paint swatches, projected and traced the image, then painted it by filling each color in, with the help of assistants. On the last day I chose to render the two hands in the center to make it more of a focal point and to switch it up from the hard-edge style. I wanted to make them glow from the cosmic elements.

“I feel like “Touch” brings a lot of color to the area, and also ideas of community, hope, and solidarity,” she added. People tag me on Instagram with their hands coming together like those in the mural, so it’s great to see that it’s created an interactive element of touch as well.”

Another example is “The Last Parade,” on the side of the Kress building, which presents artist Rudy Herrera’s Native American heritage as a bright cartoonish fantasy that looms large at 70 by 100 feet.

Herrera got started with street art helping out with San Anto Cultural Arts’ mural program. To complete the massive piece for Centro he called on helpers of his own. “I had a whole team working with me –Ana Hernandez, Crystal Tamez, Ashley Garcia and other friends. Andi at Centro was my big champion. And Andy Benavides was so great – he brought us lunch so we could stay there and work from 9 a.m. to 11 p.m. every day to get it finished.”

“It feels like the biggest thing I’ve done as an artist,” Herrera said. “Now I feel like it has its own life.”

Centro also commissioned San Antonio Poet Laureate Andrea “Vocab” Sanderson to create a temporary word art project called “Jubilant and Exuberant Is the Melanin of Our Skin,” on the streets on the perimeter of Travis Park last year. “George Floyd’s story was so heart-breaking for many people, I decided we needed to paint the street, but we didn’t want to channel anger,” Andi Rodriguez said.

“So, I approached Vocab Sanderson and said ‘I want to paint the street with yellow letters from your poem that is so full of joy and hope.” The project involved interfacing with several departments of the City  and with VIA (city buses had to be re-routed while the four streets involved were painted), but Rodriguez navigated the hurdles, and Anthony Dean Harris and Scotch! worked overnight with 20 volunteers to complete the work, which drew national attention. 

More “21 in 21” projects include Lionel Sosa’s portraits for his “Living in My Skin” project, at the parking lot adjacent to the Tobin Center; Ghost’s “Wish You Were Here” on Back Unturned Brewing, and Mark Hogensen’s “Untitled” at Travis Park Plaza. Rodriguez said she is in discussions with Hilton Palacio del Rio general manager about creating a mural on the hotel’s big white wall that faces artist Sebastian’s towering Torch of Friendship. 

Rodriguez works closely with Racca-Sittre’s department at the city. Because every piece she commissions is in the downtown historic district, she also works with the city’s Office of Historic Preservation and Historic Design and Review Commission. And of course, with private building owners.

“It’s a really interesting process,” she said. “I’ve learned a lot – especially when we did the mural on the side of the Kress Building on Houston Street. The wall was built in 1929 and the brick is historic, so I worked with the Office of Historic Preservation making sure the paints we used were low vapor and wouldn’t harm the brick, so we had to learn how to prep without compromising the structure.”

While many independently created murals have sprung up all over the city, putting murals in the downtown footprint is more complicated, Rodriguez notes.

“It’s really hard. It takes a lot of work. Without all the right permits, a building owner could get fined, and it’s a big fine. There are a lot of things we have to do, in order to do it well. Now we have people coming to us when they’re building new buildings and they want a mural, and I can advise them about the process. We can help – we can connect you with the artists and help make it happen from a city standpoint.”

Rodriguez partners with CAUSA (Culture and Arts United for San Antonio), a recently formed non-profit comprised of more than 20 local arts organizations, to help select artists for their projects.

“I look to CAUSA to help us adjudicate selections,” Rodriguez said. “You can put up art, but are you really helping artists? We really want these projects to be authentic. “

Rodriguez’s team is currently working on putting QR codes on all the Art Everywhere pieces. She also hopes to link to the artists’ websites or Facebook pages. A digital art map that will include the names of the artist and of the piece, is also in the works.   Two things are certain; the mural revolution is still flourishing, and our city center is a hot spot for this very hot art form. So go downtown and enjoy!