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J14/SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 20, 1987 SAN ANTONIO LIGHT ART Hispanic artists display their influences in exhibit By STEVE BENNETT Staff writer [[image]] APPARITION: "A Ghost With a Secret Floated Across My Bed" is by Teresa Ana Ybanez. [[image]] CLIENT SERIES: A silver gelatin print by Mary Jessie Garza. If there is one thing that can be said about Hispanic art, it is that there is not simply one thing that can be said about Hispanic art. That is what "influence," the exhibit of the work of 25 local Hispanic artists opening Saturday at the San Antonio Museum of Art, is all about. "I think (all-Hispanic art exhibits) are a good thing, number one, because we see who we are," said photographer Kathy Vargas, co-curator of the exhibit. "And number two - well, maybe there is no number two. They help us see how different we are, and, at the same time, they show us that we have a lot of the same concerns. "They show us we paint, we photograph, we do print, we work with clay and wood, we do abstracts, we do representational work. And it's really good! We can be whoever we want and still be Hispanic." The exhibit features a cross-section of Hispanic artists in the city, from established figures such as Alberto Mijangos and Felipe Reyes to emerging artists such as Andy Villareal and Leticia Huerta. There is painting, sculpture, printmaking, photography and an installation piece. The basic idea behind the exhibit is to show what is happening in art in San Antonio right now, so almost all the work has been done in the last two years, and none of it is more than six or seven years old. The show is the brainchild of John Mahey, museum of art director. He approached Pedro Rodriguez, director of the Gaudalupe Cultural Arts Center, and Vargas, visual arts program director at the center, last year with the idea of doing a Hispanic show at the museum. Mahey then wrote up grant proposals, with help from Vargas, and funding came through this year from the Texas Commission on the Arts and the Metropolitan Life Insurance Foundation. An "issues" committee, composed of nine local artists, administrators and curators (including Vargas, Jim Edwards, contemporary art curator for the San Antonio Museum Association, Pedro Rodriguez and painter Mel Casas, chairman of the art department at San Antonio College), began laying the groundwork for the show, focusing it, developing a theme. "The main thing that kept coming up in talking with all these people was influences," Vargas said. "People would talk about the Mexican influence, Chicano influence, the mainstream influence, and I began to think that maybe that's what binds it all together - the Chicano/Mexican/mainstream influences not only in the artists' work, but in their lives as well." In February, Vargas and Edwards began searching for artists to be in the show, visiting studios, looking at slides, attending exhibits with Hispanic work. At one point, more than 60 artists were being considered. Vargas, Casas, Edwards and Rodriguez made the final selections for the show. Edwards, who was hired by SAMA in March, says, "Being the new kid in town, I was especially pleased and surprised at the great variety of work we saw. Even though I'm fully immersed in the arts as a curator, that doesn't mean I'm excluded from having certain biases beforehand when it comes to Hispanic art. "I was aware of, say, Hispanic abstract expressionism, but I guess I was expecting a lot of 'Hispanic' imagery. And there was work that addressed Hispanic culture, but I was just amazed at how articulate the artists were in expressing their emotions in their work and verbally. It just exceeded my expectations." The show is divided into three parts. (Mainly because it was given the smallest exhibit space in the museum - the first floor of the Maddux Tower near the gift shop. The curators are not exactly thrilled with the space, but they were told it was all that was available.) From Sept. 26 to Nov. 1, Jose Luis Rivera, Jesse Trevino, Felipe Reyes, Terry Ybanez, Mary Jessie Garza, Guss Garcia, Miguel Cortinas and Louis LeRoy will exhibit. Diana Cardenas, Cesar Martinez, Anita Valencia, David Cardenas, Carolina Flores, Tony Villejo, Andy Villareal, Jesse Amado and Alberto Mijangos are up from Nov. 7-Dec. 13. The final leg, from Dec. 19-Jan. 25, features Raymond Hernandez, Gilberto Tarin, Adan Hernandez, Pedro Ramirez, Al Rendon, Nivia Gonzalez, Leticia Huerta and Robert Gonzalez. A reception honoring the artists will be held from 3-5 p.m. Sept. 27th at the museum. ARTISTS: SAMA exhibit adds chapter to Chicano art movement ARTISTS/from J11 [[image]] HUMANSCAPE: An acrylic on canvas painted by Mel Casas. [[image]] MEL CASAS Co-founder of Con Safo Hispanic-American art yet assembled. Here in San Antonio, another milestone will be achieved this Saturday when the San Antonio Museum of Art opens "Influence," an exhibit featuring 25 local Chicano artists. The show is being presented in three parts, continuing through January 1988. Presented in conjunction with the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center, the show includes well-known artists Cesar Martinez and Jesse Trevino, as well as some relatively new names, such as Leticia Huerta and Jesse Amado. "Influence" was curated by Kathy Vargas, the Guadalupe's visual arts director, and Jim Edwards, the museum's contemporary art curator. San Antonio College art department chairman Mel Casas, one of the founders of Con Safo, was on an advisory committee that helped select the artists for the exhibition. As such he disqualified himself from being in the show, but Vargas feels Casas' role enhanced the stature of the show. "I think all Hispanic artists respect Casas because he has a conscience," Vargas said. "You know he'll do the right thing." The SAMA show is another chapter in the ongoing development of San Antonio's Chicano art movement. Casas is particularly important because he is an integral part of the movement's history. It is a history that is filled with significant achievements, but also fraught with ego clashes, political discord, and ultimately, artistic differences. The local movement started in 1967 when a group of artists, led by Felipe Reyes and Jesse Almazan, formed El Grupo (The Group). The small circle of artists, who were also friends, was based at Galerias Almazan in La Villita. "It was essentially certain civil rights events that caused our concern," Reyes said. "It was because we were not participating in the art world, even though we'd made the commitment to be artists." Art, not politics, has been the principal concern for Reyes. The articulate San Antonio native is considered one of the best-educated students of art history in the city. Reyes speaks with a quiet passion that hints of the stridency that fueled his efforts in the 1970's. "We wanted to create an organization that would give us self-determination," Reyes said. That notion of self-determination also was fueling the Chicano political movement, which was in part started by the fight for farmworkers' rights. That in turn prompted the formation of a number of student-activist organizations on campuses throughout the Southwest and California. Out of the political experience was born Chicano art. The early definition of Chicano art was the highly stylized graphic work that adorned protest signs, posters and banners. Looking to Mexico and its revolution for inspiration, Chicano artists also gave birth to the mural movement that produced public work in an inverted, geographic arch extending from Chicago to San Antonio to Los Angeles to Seattle. Here in San Antonio, the development of Chicano politics paralleled what was happening in other parts of the country. The Texas Farmworkers Union was following in the footsteps of Cesar Chavez's United Farmworkers Union in California. A political party, La Raza Unida, spawned student organizations such as MECHA (El Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán), which had chapters on campuses throughout Texas. (Aztlan is the Aztec name used to define the U.S. land that once belonged to Mexico.) "As a result of the Chicano movement, we became aware of some of those social ideas, so we wanted our art to begin to address some of those concerns," Reyes said. Thus, El Grupo became Los Pintores de Aztlán (The Painters of Azatlan). Later the group would change names again, this time to Los Pintores de la Nueva Raza (The Painters of the New Race). The change was prompted by a grant from the Academia de La Raza, a New Mexico-based foundation seeking to address social change through the arts. But eventually, a split surfaced among the members of Pintores. "There was a group that wanted to go further left," Reyes said. "But we didn't want to substitute political goals in place of art-related goals." At about the same time, Jacinto Quirarte, then a University of Texas at Austin professor, began work on "Mexican American Artists," a book that would provide the first in-depth study of this developing genre. Quirarte is now director of the UTSA Research Center for the Arts and Humanities. He transferred to UTSA in 1972 to be the school's first dean of the division of art and humanities. Quirarte's book took an academic approach that explored the history of Hispanic art, culminating with profiles of those who had begun calling themselves "Chicano artists." Among them was Mel Casas, who was one of the more outspoken, opinionated and respected artists of the time. There was always a begrudging respect between Quirarte and Casas. While the more conservative Quirarte considered Casas one of the premier artists of the genre, they have had run-ins over the years, including a philosophical difference over the title of a symposium on Mexican-American art organized by Quirarte in 1973. "I wanted it to be called 'Chicano Art,'" Casas said. "Quirarte didn't." In the meantime, Reyes had left Pintores because of the political split, with the intent of starting another group. For advice he went to Casas. But initially Casas was not sold on the idea of such organizations. When Quirarte interviewed Casas in the summer of 1970, the professor asked the artist if there was "a movement or a group of Chicano artists in San Antonio." Casas answered, "Efforts have been made in the past to start such movements. When I had a studio downtown I would invariably get involved with people who wanted to talk in those terms. But what bothered me is that we were not talking about art, we were talking about its racial aspects. "In other words, we happen to be Mexican-Americans, let's form a group that way. But no one questioned the validity of such a position. It meant nothing and it sort of bothered me. Because I am of Mexican descent and I readily admit it. But that doesn't make me an artist. I am not a professional Mexican." Nevertheless, Casas acquiesced to Reyes' request and, in 1973, even provided the name for Con Safo. Con Safo is a commonly used barrio term that was best defined by San Antonian Santos Martinez, curator of "Dale Gas" (Give it Gas), the seminal Chicano exhibit presented at the Contemporary Art Museum in Houston in 1977: "Con Safo is a barrio-oriented graffiti term that functions as a mode for the cancellation of social pressure. In short, Con Safo contains power to ward off evil spirits." Casas wrote the group's manifestos, including the famous "Brown Paper Report," which stated that "if Americana was 'sensed' through blue eyes, now brown vision is demanding equal views - polychroma instead of monochroma. Brown eyes have visions, too. It's George Washington and Che Guevara homogenized into one." Casas was the spiritual leader of the group. Reyes called him a "role model." Casas is known to be somewhat enigmatic when talking about art, but the El Paso native has always spoken clearly about social and racial issues. "When I came to San Antonio 25 years ago, it was a shock," Casas said. "Mexicanos here were very submissive. I was the only Mexican instructor in the entire school and I was imported." Regarding Con Safo, Casas said, "We were at a cross-purposes in a lot of ways, but we got paid for exhibitions and sold quite a few slide presentations." The group exhibited throughout the state, and even in Oklahoma and Michigan. Slide presentations of the members' work were sold to colleges throughout the country. But aesthetic differences began to divide Con Safo. The group's elected officers, which did not include Casas, questioned potential members about the content of their work, and some were criticized for not painting overt Chicano imagery. In 1974, Martinez, Pena and Garza resigned over philosophical differences and formed another group called Los Quemados (The Burned Ones.) Their resignation letter capsulized the discord. "Our withdrawal from (Con Safo) is nothing personal. We do have differences, but we don't have a chauvinistic attitude about our approach. There are ways and there are other ways. We hope that (Con Safo) will work towards something meaningful not only to the art world, but to la gente (the people). Nobody but la gente can be the final authority." Reyes was gone during this period. He went to Michigan for graduate school and when he returned in 1975, Con Safo was on its last legs. Nevertheless, a great deal of progress had been achieved. "When I came back, many of our goals were beginning to happen," Reyes said. "Hispanic artists were involved in the greater community. They had developed a professionalized approach, which makes it easier to add legitimacy. "I think if nothing else, (Con Safo) played a small part in that process. We provided an education on our culture and how it can be used as a source and a resource in art work. "It served to educate the Hispanic community about the needs of Hispanic artists. It also provided experience within the discipline for leadership roles. Many of our ideas eventually gravitated to what is now the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center and other such groups. Many of the artists who were in Con Safo, such as Pena, Garza and Briseno, now live in other parts of the country. But the others remain and many of them are in the exhibit at SAMA. "We wanted to create an organization that would give us self-determination." -Felipe Reyes Explaining the formation of El Grupo Most of those artists have undergone tremendous growth since the birth of the movement. The artists have changed and so has their art. It never was easy, and now it's virtually impossible to define a Chicano style. "Chicano art" is simply any work made by artists who identify with the social connotations of the label "Chicano." It is a term that still can spark heated debate between generations of a family; a term that assumes a certain political standing. It is a term that also defines a cultural standing: Chicanos are neither fully American nor fully Mexican. They are a unique mixture, a mestizaje. Despite the efforts of mainstream curators to organize Hispanic American art shows that include the work of Chicanos, Puerto Ricans and Cubans, many Chicano artists are concerned about maintaining their identity. The notion of such labels gets a rise out of Casas, who has been chairman of SAC's art department since 1977 and remains as outspoken as ever. "I think the term 'Chicano art' is very useful in one way," Casas said. "It gives people an identify that is self-imposed. "It gives people self-worth. They can say 'See, I'm an artist,' with a string that ties them to art history and the rest of the world." If anything can be said in general about Chicano artists, it is that their cultural experience has provided a palette of colors seemingly unavailable to non-Chicano artists. Yet, the work itself seems to have found a comfortable niche in this country's art spectrum. "We are part of the unfolding, an important part of American art," Reyes said. Reyes is somehow symbolic of this unfolding. He has exhibited widely throughout the country, but never in the San Antonio Museum of Art. On the day the museum show opens, Reyes will be celebrating more than his 43rd birthday.
