Jewel in the rough: the annual Contemporary Art Month reveals a city with a dynamic and increasingly progressive art scene - Report From San Antonio

No longer the sleepy little village of Western-movie fame or the military town that once boasted five bases, San Antonio is now known as a tourist destination. It is also a hot spot of contemporary art, drawing more and more art-world visitors each year, especially during Contemporary Art Month (CAM) in July.

CAM was initiated in 1985 in conjunction with the opening of the Contemporary Art for San Antonio/Blue Star Art Space, the nonprofit that still coordinates the events calendar and anchors the annual festivities. An artist-run institution, Blue Star was established by a group of local artists who were dissatisfied with the indifference then shown to contemporary art by the only game in town, the San Antonio Museum of Art. "Contemporary" remains a significant modifier to distinguish CAM's focus not only from historical or premodern work, but from Western or cowboy art and the related, still pervasive, genre of landscape painting, which first took form in 19th-century South Texas as "bluebonnet painting."

Blue Star

Located in the King William neighborhood, south of downtown, what is familiarly referred to as the Blue Star arts complex is the hub of artistic activity in San Antonio. It includes the Blue Star Art Space, which occupies a 10,000-square-foot former warehouse; a number of nearby loosely affiliated commercial, nonprofit and experimental galleries; as well as studios, apartments and small businesses. Most gallery openings are held on the first Friday of each month and attract thousands of people, ranging from serious art collectors to artsy teenagers and rowdy revelers who transform the complex and the adjacent South Alamo Street--with its restaurants, bars and storefront galleries--into a sprawling street fair.

Under founding director Jeffrey Moore, Blue Star's programming included local and regional group shows and the occasional large-scale installation by artists such as Sandy Skoglund or Michael Tracy, or the Cincinnati-based collaborative TODT. In 1997, Moore was replaced by Carla Stellweg, the peripatetic former New York art dealer, who broadened the exhibition program to include more Chicano and Latin American artists and also gave greater attention to photography and conceptual art. Due to unresolvable differences with the board of directors over policy and the direction of the institution, Stellweg resigned last July--in the middle of Contemporary Art Month. Laurence Miller, former director of Austin's Laguna Gloria Museum and founding director of the local ArtPace foundation, was engaged as interim adviser to the board. Following an ongoing internal study and reconsideration of its mission, Blue Star hopes, Miller told A.i.A., that "the institution has arrived at a point where a good, serious young director will consider coming here."

In the midst of administrative upheaval, Blue Star mounted an ambitious CAM show. Organized by curatorial assistant Risa Puleo and San Antonio artist Ethel Shipton, "Here/There: An Exploration of Public Art" included projects by 16 San Antonio artists. The most impressive were storefront installations along South Alamo Street, where the artists were given free rein to produce conceptual works, performances and sculptural tableaux. Henry Rayburn's charming installation of found objects, including two rather moth-eaten, stuffed and dressed-up raccoonlike creatures, appeared in the window of a vintage clothing store. Sweet and pathetic, the work was a thoughtful response to the store's contents. In contrast, Riley Robinson utilized an abandoned space, previously occupied by a paint store, as a raw site for two abstract sculptures. Both are 5-foot spheres, one made from strips of bent plywood held together by wires, the other crafted of welded steel.

Each artist in "Here/There" was invited to present a two-part project, with work shown at the Blue Star exhibition space relating to a street-side installation. In the paint store's window, Karen Mahaffy, for example, presented racks of starched and pressed blue uniform shirts. The multitude of neatly aligned identical shirts symbolized the anonymity of working-class labor. Mahaffy's piece was supplemented by a video, which was projected in a small room at Blue Star, documenting scores of scurrying workers at a nearby cleaning and pressing plant. Many other artists, however, used the gallery space as a showcase for previously executed work. The most successful projects established intelligible connections between the outdoor and gallery-bound works. Cakky Brawley's welded aluminum throne, for example, glinted like a winking eye in the afternoon sun in front of a South Alamo Street law office. At Blue Star, a similar piece took on a more serious presence and was less notable, failing to evoke the frisson of incongruity.

Also opening on the first Friday of CAM was "Art in the 'Hood," a civic-minded celebration of the King William and adjacent Southtown neighborhoods as San Antonio's creative center. Fifty Southtown artists participated in this year's event, which was headquartered at the former Mexican Baptist Church on South Alamo Street. Nearly 100 works of art were installed in cubby-holes and classrooms on the church's second floor. Given the democratic parameters of the exhibition, the quality of works ranged from the conceptually and technically sophisticated to the more predictably untutored and folksy.