Most days my habit is to cruise the streets of San Antonio on my bike finding adventures and a thousand piquant things to observe. Did I say a thousand? a million, as many as the eye can see, from tiny to huge, squirrels to murals.
This town is rife with murals, large and boisterous, provocative, ubiquitous, beautiful, startling - on the west-side, downtown, near north-side, south-side, east-side, everywhere-side: there’s art to discover in this town.
It’s an old tradition going back to the Chicano grafitti art of the 60’s which goes back to the Mexican cultural revolution of 1910 which goes back to the Aztecs and the Mayans and all the way back to the Olmec living along the Gulf coast way back in the BC days.
Symbology. Colors. Stories. Literature for the illiterate. Murals were used across cultures and across millennia. When the Spanish conquistadors came here, along with their accomplices the Franciscan friars 300 years ago and took the place over, they painted their missions with murals. The idea was to attract the natives with the colorful paintings and get them to join up. It was cultural appropriation.
Today you can find mural paintings all over downtown: bold, declarative, impossible to ignore (one is 10 stories high), sending out a message, portraying our history and our culture in exquisite detail.
This new mural that I found just a few days ago blew my mind. Cruising down west Houston Street, past the giant statue of Tom Frost standing next to his bank, just before the San Pedro Creek Culture Park - there it was. Wow. It’s done in the same style as the aforementioned 10 story mural which is at Jefferson and Houston. I have to find out who this artist is.
The painting depicts our collective memory, basically, our traditions and cultural artifacts laid out for all to see and with the new Frost Bank Tower and the old Frost Bank Tower looming in the background. Frost Bank provided the fuel that drove the economic engine that transformed this place from a country bumpkin kind of hangout place where people brought their farm products to town in horse drawn wagons and parked them in Main Plaza and sold vegetables to the townspeople, into a real city. Now we’ve got shopping malls and expressways.
The splashy, liquid element is his thing, it flows out of and into everything like a cardiovascular system pumping blood or a pinball machine if it were made out of a gushy liquid instead of having a metal ball, the Rasta guy preaching from the Bible with the anvil on his hand and the almost normal kid sitting on his lap, the bottle in the water with a note in it and the butterfly crying tears of a beautiful woman who is also a cat (lots of cats in this painting), the boat, they’re in a boat with alot of flowers and the almost normal kid is playing his instrument with a far away look on his face like ‘where is my song?’ and the wooden puppet guy looking two ways at once, the source of all this commotion, smoke billowing out of the twin towers on his head pouring into the background while the moonshine or whatever it is he’s pouring from his barrel flows out lights everything on fire with the holy flame.
Interpretation optional. Go look at it and forget everything I said.
Murals still hold the ancient magic. They evoke deep connections and subliminal memories. It’s public art. Always on. Free. Standing sentinel on a sunny street corner to protect and preserve our important cultural traits. Shining out like a lighthouse.
I figured out who the artist is: Rudy Marco Herrera. I found his tag, tracked him down on the centrosanantonio website. Below is the other painting that I mentioned. I met him while he was working on it with a giant crane. He likes big paintings.
music by Tour Maubourg 9:35-15:48
oh my god one of the best ever / delightful
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