Return to 2007 Press Releases
SAN ANTONIO
-- The Contemporary Galleries of the San Antonio Museum of Art will re-open in honor of San Antonio’s Contemporary Art Month on July 7, 2007 with a completely new installation. Following his arrival last September as The Brown Foundation Curator of Contemporary Art, David S. Rubin began inventorying the Museum’s holdings. According to Rubin, “It has been a most stimulating process, full of discoveries and surprises. I found some interesting threads and I hope my installation will enable visitors to better understand the relationships that exist from one object to the next.”Objects will now be grouped somewhat thematically, which Rubin believes will add a sense of continuity and also contextualize each work in terms of its history, purpose, and content. Sections will be devoted to traditional subjects, such as portraits, still life, and landscape, while abstract painting, one of the collection’s chief strengths, will unfold in a somewhat chronological fashion that reveals the evolution and development of abstract art. Other areas, determined by the Museum’s existing holdings, include assemblage sculpture and groupings devoted to identity and heritage and other social issues that defined the late twentieth century. It is also significant that artists who live in Texas will no longer be isolated within a separate space. Instead, their work will be seen alongside those by artists from all over the world. “In our current age of globalization and with dissemination of information made so easy through the Internet,” Rubin notes, “it seems out of date to distinguish artists from one another based on where they live. I learned a long time ago that there is great art everywhere, Texas included. Art is a universal language, so we will look at it that way in our museum.”
The new reinstallation includes familiar objects and some rarely or never before seen gems. Viewers are sure to recognize many visitor favorites—such as paintings by pioneering twentieth century artists like Hans Hofmann, Frank Stella, Richard Diebenkorn, Helen Frankenthaler, Alberto Mijangos, and Michael Tracy. Recent acquisitions on view include a story quilt by African American artist Faith Ringgold; a sculpture by Dario Robleto, a San Antonio native who has earned national recognition in the past few years; and a classic painting by Cynthia Carlson, who was an active figure in the Pattern and Decoration Movement of the 1970s. Also on exhibition are works that have been in storage some time, among them an early found-object sculpture by Donald Lipski, and major paintings by Ronald Davis and Irene Rice Pereira. Davis was internationally recognized in the 1960s-70s, and Pereira was a pioneering abstract artist in the 1950s, when women artists were generally not being shown or collected by most museums.
A strong believer that “art is for everyone,” Rubin hopes to make the language of contemporary art more understandable to audiences of all backgrounds through clear and simple text labels that will focus on the meaning and purpose of each artwork. Additionally, he will host public conversations with artists from the collection throughout the month of July.
The schedule is as follows: Sunday, July 8, 2 pm - Dario Robleto
Tuesday, July 17, 6:30 pm – Gregory Amenoff
Tuesday, July 24, 6:30 pm – Constance Lowe
Tuesday, July 31, 6:30 pm – Rolando Briseno
All artist conversations will take place in the Museum’s auditorium and are free and open to the public.