My work Coahuiltecan has been chosen to be exhibited on the outside of the new Frost Tower in San Antonio in 2022~! I’m super excited that this piece will be part of Centro San Antonio’s Art in the Public Realm series!
This piece was made for Common Currents, a city-wide exhibition of 300 San Antonio artists, each assigned to a year in the city's history. As part of San Antonio's Tricentennial Celebration, the exhibition was hosted by four major San Antonio Art institutions including Artpace, where this piece was shown. This piece received the most “likes” on Instagram of any other piece in the Artpace exhibition! The year assigned to me was 1724.
The Coahuiltecan were the nomadic indigenous people living in San Antonio and surrounding areas in 1724. That year, a severe storm, possibly a hurricane, destroyed the original Alamo (Mission San Antonio de Valero) at San Pedro Springs, which was simply a series of huts that had been used by the Spanish missionaries to indoctrinate the Coahuiltecan into Christianity. That same year after the storm, construction began on the "new" Alamo at the location where it now sits, and where this process of indoctrination continued. This piece foregrounds the Coahuiltecan wickiup--the impermanent, portable dwellings they constructed out of brush and branches--in a black and white, somewhat removed image that is in the process of being airbrushed/disintegrated into the landscape. This visual metaphor of disintegration directly correlates with the deliberate disintegration of the Coahuiltecan's culture by the Spanish colonizers. Behind the wickiup and bleeding through it is an image of the Alamo on its current site shortly after it was reduced to ruins. The layered structures sit high in a harsh landscape with gathering clouds--a coming storm. A page of text used in the missionaries' enculturation/indoctrination process entitled "Fallacías del Demonio Que Destruyen lá Caridad (Fallacies of the Demon That Destroys Charity)" hovers over and intrudes on the landscape. The Coahuiltecan hunted javelina and wore coyote skins, thus the appearance of these animals in the motif.
