Community members and businesses across the city are offering events and fundraisers for San Antonio’s LGBTQ+ community, including new ones and old favorites. Whether you’re hoping for a night out on the town or looking to celebrate from the comfort of your own home, there’s something for you. “de los otros” Acclaimed San Antonio artist…
Pace Foundation Acquires Two-Large Scale Photos by Gay Filmmaker Isaac Julien
The Linda Pace Foundation has acquired two large scale photographs by filmmaker and installation artist, Isaac Julien from his 1989 film Looking For Langston. The two production stills, Film-Noir Angels and Masquerade No. 3 provide examples of the dreamlike vision Julien’s film creates in portraying poet Langston Hughes as a Harlem Renaissance gay icon. In…
Rites of Passage: Forever Remembering Tía Chuck
A lot has changed in San Antonio in the seven years since Chuck Ramirez died. There are working artists, young ones and transplants from elsewhere, who never knew him. To his extended group of close friends, acquaintances, a still-tight micro-community of Southtown artists (for whom the rise of Artpace and Sala Diaz, the expansion of…
Local Exhibitions Celebrate Diversity, Emphasize Humanity
In the wake of Kathy Griffin’s recent photo scandal, involving the fake severed head of President Donald Trump, artists around the country continue to speak out against the anti-immigrant and non-inclusive policies of the president’s administration. While most can agree that Griffin’s staged photo of a beheading crosses the line of decency, it no doubt…
On the Chartreuse Couch: Gene Elder Interviews Tony Villejo
Gene: Hi Tony! Welcome to the Chartreuse Couch. Tony: Hi Gene, thanks for the interview. Gene: Well, we have been friends since you were one of the first artists to have a studio at Blue Star. It was quite a dump then. Why don’t you recall that experience for us. Tony: Well Gene, 1986 at…
Artpace Exhibit Reveals “Diversity” of San Antonio Art Community
As part of its year-long 21st birthday celebration, this summer’s Artpace Window Works Exhibition offers a photographic glimpse by Ramin Samandari of former exhibiting artists, collaborators, and staffers. Titled “Faces of Artpace,” the exhibition comprises 56 portraits from Samandari’s larger project San Antonio Faces of Art, which has been two years in the making, and opens at…
Found in Translation: Wu Tsang & boychild’s Captivating Collaborations
Though Wu Tsang and Tosh are hard at work on their Artpace residency project, they agree to spare me half an hour. The Los Angeles-based couple have received a dizzying number of intriguing deliveries, Artpace staffers tell me. In addition to their International Artist-In-Residence exhibition (on view through May 15), Wu and Tosh are readying…
The Art and Activism of San Antonio Native Donald Moffett
As a little-understood plague decimated the gay community, San Antonio-born artist Donald Moffett had a life-changing experience when he heard about Larry Kramer’s call to action in March 1987 at the Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center in New York, the founding moment for the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, best known as ACT UP.…
Celebrate Artpace’s 21st Birthday — All Year Long
You know that friend that celebrates their entire “birthday week”? Well, say hello to Artpace, which recently wrapped up a yearlong 20th anniversary celebration that included last year’s excellent “Hare and Hound Press + Artpace: The Art of Collaboration” exhibition, the Texas premiere of Christian Marclay’s video projection Guitar Drag and the publication of Felix Gonzalez–Torres: Billboards, a book documenting a 2010 exhibition…
The Witty World of Franco Mondini-Ruiz
A Quick Biographical Rundown Franco Mondini-Ruiz was born in 1961. He grew up in conservative, white Boerne, Texas. His father is a rakish and artistic immigrant from Italy who grew up during the Mussolini regime. His mother is Mexican-American and the daughter of a severe Spaniard, and she occasionally posed for Franco’s father’s paintings. Franco…