2025 Art Roundup
Support artists and galleries in your city!
San Antonio is filled with an immense amount of artistic talent. I love attending art exhibitions to support artists and to gain inspiration from my conversations with them. The highlighted shows and artworks in this essay were viewed in the San Antonio area last year.
Women Artists of the Ballets Russes: Designing the Legacy was an exquisite exhibition at the McNay Art Museum. This exhibition honored several female designers and choreographers who worked behind the scenes for the Ballets Russes ballet company. To encompass this important era of ballet history, Women Artists of the Ballets Russes consisted of beautiful costumes, design sketches, programs, performance excerpts, and photographs from Ballets Russes performances. Several American ballet dancers were also highlighted, including Maria Tallchief and Raven Wilkinson, noting racial disparities in the dance form that still occur today.
For Xicanx Month, S.M.A.R.T. Project Space had the deeply moving and inspiring exhibition MIJA/X – MIJX/A, where artists challenged identities often constructed by cultural and societal norms. I had a wonderful conversation with Díana Rocha about her artwork Healer and Warrior, a piece that reflects her familial heritage and various parts of her mental health journey. Other pieces in MIJA/X – MIJX/A included Recuerdos, an illustration by Jack Salgado of her great-grandmother, Cara de Nopales, laser photographed images on a prickly pear cactus by Samantha Garcia, and Elena Hernandez-Peña’s gorgeously crafted Somos Perros, a lamp made with leather rawhide, graphite, image transfer, oil pastel, thread, linseed oil, plywood, and brass.
Brenden Cicoria’s splendid ralentir was featured in the We’re in the Industry exhibition at Interloper Gallery. A hallow sculpture made of plaster, wax, and graphite, visually the piece looks like a cast or glove, but there is a sense of spiritual presence in ralentir. A variety of drawings are drawn directly onto the piece, with the French word ralentir encompassing the space between the thumb and index finger. Ralentir means “to slow down”; perhaps a reminder to remember to take time to slow down our busy lives.
The Paper Room Studio’s exhibition Mail Room - A Nod to the Legacy of Mail Art: A Group Art Show in the Paper Room Studio in The Upstairs Studio at Blue Star was an incredibly unique exhibition. Artists were incredibly creative and used items such as post office boxes, packing materials, and letters from loved ones to create their pieces. I enjoyed flipping through Philip Scheldt’s handcrafted moleskin journal that contained Depression Era vignettes and other historic memorabilia.
Hannah Prince’s MFA thesis exhibition, The Forest Remembers What the Axe Forgets, was a brilliant combination of mystical themes and elements from the earth. Deeply personal power objects filled the room with protection and energy. Referencing nature, tree branches or small sticks were parts of various works or placed strategically on the gallery walls. Prince painted many of her works on pieces of unstretched canvas and embellished them with fringe. Prince’s use of color is spectacular; not only in the way she layers them, but also how she experiments with different colors to paint nude representations of herself.
Aolani Tagle’s The Master Archives of Turning Into a Bee for the University of Texas San Antonio Fall 2025 BFA Exhibition was a magnificent arrangement of family pictures, ceramics, aluminum, wood, and dead bees. Tagle incorporated bees throughout the piece, on images of herself, around her great-grandfather, and used a queen bee on her grandmother’s forehead. Her use of bees not only honors her great-grandfather’s line of work as a beekeeper, but also matriarchal societies. Bee colonies are matriarchal; the queen and worker bees in a hive are female. Placing a queen bee on her grandmother’s forehead can be seen as reinforcing this strong female figure in Tagle’s life, as the queen bee is in a hive.