South Texas Life and Visual Culture

South Texas Life and Visual Culture features artists whose works reflect the diverse character of shared San Antonio and regional narratives and the artists’ own personal experiences, their understanding of cultural and creative legacies, as well as their commitments to challenging discrimination and marginalization and to encouraging appreciation of heritage, difference, and personal and group experience and activism.

Guillermina Zabala’s installations respond to the horrors of sexual assault cases in the US and globally, with scars from violence present but giving way to resistance and healing. Andrea “Vocab” Sanderson draws upon African American and San Antonio’s long multi-cultural history to present in spoken word performance her most recent work considering the challenges, opportunities, and possibilities of proceeding into future contexts. Luis Valderas’s installation Dream of the Birth of Huitzilopochtli evokes portals that represent the multiple passages between the luminal world of ancestral myths and the realities of Mexican heritage in the present. As a first-generation Mexican American, Gabi Magaly’s photography installations reflect the pressures put on girls and young women to respond to machismo and to conform to social and cultural norms. Her work presents intimate, positive images of Brown relationships across generations to encourage defiance, empowerment, and hope for change.

This exhibition is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Texas Commission on the Arts.