CAM Perennial Interior Realities Curated by Lauren Cross, PhD

Interior Realities curated by Lauren Cross, PhD 
Southwest School of Art 
March 5-April 6, 2022 
Juan Escobedo
Anthony Francis
Gabe Garcia
Carly Garza
Gabi Magaly
Bárbara Miñarro
Patty Ortiz
Alán Serna
Julysa Sosa
Alannah Tiller
Doerte Weber
Guillermina Zabala
Curatorial Statement 
Interiors are often framed by visible and invisible lines of reality. They shape or establish what is inside and at the exterior. These real life and material constructions form borders and territories around people, land and space. When curating the 2022 Contemporary Arts Month Perennial, I was most taken by artists whose work served to better define those complex truths.
As a native Texan who has traveled to San Antonio my whole life both professionally and personally, I found a deep sense of connection talking with the many San Antonio artists living and working in the region. During my visits with these artists there was both familiarity and unfamiliarity, shared and isolated knowledge. The kind of nuance that really foregrounds great conversations. I learned a lot from their stories—the thin margins that shape their multi-layered experiences. I was also drawn to the diversity within their narratives. The idea that one place could generate a conglomerate of encounters amongst different people based on their own living histories.
Through these series of discussions with artists in San Antonio, I witnessed a thread materializing, which paired with my own perspectives about what it means to be living, surviving, and working through constant, ever-evolving global transitions. Interior Realitiesemerged as an exhibition that explores the ways in which these artists grapple with and explore the many definitions surrounding their identities. The artists selected for the show are investigating the distinctive qualities that reveal our human uniqueness, and surveying the relationships that exist between the land and people living inside and outside of their communities. More specifically, the history, geography, and politics of living as an artist in the city of San Antonio appeared consciously, subconsciously, and/or unconsciously central to the lens in which each artist pursued their work.
The 2022 Contemporary Arts Month Perennial also presented the opportunity to spread the conversation amongst these artists across two spaces, each having its own legacy within the San Antonio art scene. Having two exhibition spaces allowed me to think about how each space could frame different dimensions of the exhibition’s idea. The work displayed at the Southwest School of Art would speak to the ways in which personal identity, borders, and land relationships illuminate the realities of oppression or the ways in which suppressed realities enact agency, expression, and reclamation as a source of survival and empowerment. Sala Diaz’ artist-centered mission would feature artists whose work highlights the complexities of an artist’s identity from the personal to the political. Together these exhibitions tell us about the ways identity colors our existence and how artists themselves learn to create a world inside and outside of its borders.