Continued from Part I… V. Reynosa, Narcolandia and sad, sad data It’s important to point out that Rigoberto Gonzalez is not a Chicano artist, though he shares a lot of the same concerns, and is deeply interested in Chicano art and culture. But he’s a Mexican artist living (legally, understand) in the United States. He [...]

I. Some Art Context I have so much to show you. This is the first painting I ever saw by Rigoberto Gonzalez. It appeared in the Virginia Rutledge-curated Texas Biennial show of 2011, and it stopped me cold. The marriage of subject matter and technique felt shockingly fresh. This is a hell of an accomplishment; [...]

Basketball season brings out the aggrieved San Antonian in me. I am a Spurs fan, of course. Not a basketball enthusiast, necessarily, but a Spurs fan. This is a congenital condition. It’s brought on not just because San Antonio has no other major league sporting teams to diffuse our ardor, but because San Antonio is [...]

  Hello, and thank you for joining me for this, the inaugural blog post for the Chupacabrona Tour. (For some background info on the tour’s mission and plans, you can read this post if you want — in recap, I wanted to travel around South and West Texas and document art making in places with [...]

Did you go to this thing? Houston’s Art Ball — aka Disaster Ball, a fundraiser for this here publication, it was. I went all the way from San Antonio. I was impressed by the breadth and inventiveness of the costumes, the tipsy friendliness of the crowd, and the funky hauteur of the Colombe D’Or. There [...]

My former landlord in Williamsburg, Brooklyn—a sphinx-like Teutonic manchild who sublet me one of the ad-hoc drywall sleeping lofts in the colossal warehouse he leased near the Bedford Avenue subway stop—still owes me $1200. It was my security deposit from 2008 and I don’t expect to get it back. I don’t mean this story as revenge [...]

Justin Boyd’s Window Works installation at Artpace is called “Natural Black, Sprinkled With Cosmic Iridescence.”     This title struck me as maybe unnecessarily long when I first heard it, but after “seeing” the installation several times and talking to Justin Boyd about it, it’s won me over. Because not only does ”Natural Black, Sprinkled With [...]

  This is Guillermina “Gisha” Zabala, an artist and filmmaker from Argentina who makes her home in San Antonio with her Uruguayan husband Enrique Lopetegui, music editor of the San Antonio Current, and their daughter Shanti. You can watch an excerpt of her San Antonio Artist Foundation Award-winning film, F-Watch, here. “I, Me, Light,” Zabala’s [...]

Hi again, Glasstire readers! This is what I think y’all look like: And also like this:   Hello to you all. This December, I embark on The Chupacabrona World Tour (of South and West Texas). Over the course of five months, I aim to make ten two- and three-day trips from SATX to urban centers [...]

Hi again, Glasstire readers! This is what I think y’all look like: And also like this:   Hello to you all. This December, I embark on The Chupacabrona World Tour (of South and West Texas). Over the course of five months, I aim to make ten two- and three-day trips from SATX to urban centers [...]

My friend Rebecca watches ”RuPaul’s Drag U” with her six-year-old daughter, who’s a big fan. The six-year-old, her mother believes, doesn’t understand that Jujubee, Raven and the other drag queens are not biological women. The little girl watches for more or less the same reason her mom does — for the kitschy glamor (although the kiddo [...]

So, the Texas Contemporary Art Fair is over. (Which gives me an excuse to post the above image. This particular Rachel Hecker piece is impactful and funny in-person, too.) So I’m still processing everything I saw, PLUS I’m recovering from a bout of dog-days writer’s block, which I blame on 9/11, heatstroke and having watched [...]

Look, these are all gonna be iPhone photos. I’m sorry about that. Soon as I can, I plan to purchase a real camera, but meanwhile, this is what I’ve got to work with. Also, I’m posting this as fast as I can because it’s timely. Part 2 will come this evening, as I have to [...]

  Aaron Forland, San Antonio visual artist, SA’s unofficial DIY/underground/punk rock historian and creator of the “Keep San Antonio Lame” meme, has been and continues to extol the paradoxical and decorate the prosaic. Some of my favorite “undocumented” works by Forland, the clandestine installation of small but potent abstract works affixed to the doors on [...]

Who am I kidding with the asterixes? Anyway, several months ago I began to write a review about San Antonio Draws, a “night of a thousand stars” variety show at the McNay Art Museum. Then I stopped writing it for reasons that are completely emotional and not rational at all. I’ll tell you why at [...]

EXTRA FALL RECOMMENDATIONS! If I had my druthers, the climate of Central-South Texas would chill the fuck out starting September 1st. We’d all wear long sleeves and closed-toe shoes, and brrrr cheerfully from under our wool hat brims, our noses tingled by keen breezes a-glitter with wintry promise as the foliage turns (not-literally) to flame… [...]

September 10 will mark the one year anniversary of Douglas Britt’s notorious and fantastic e-mail (which made Gawker!) “Houston Chronicle art coverage in the post-Preview era – Part 2″. (If you’re in Houston you already know this, but the very talented and capable Britt juggles two beats—he’s both arts and “Society” writer for the Houston [...]

Hills Snyder, artist, Glasstire contributor, and director of small non-profit gallery Sala Diaz, made a short speech at the City of San Antonio Office of Cultural Affairs (OCA)  City Council Appointed Cultural Arts Board (CAB) * meeting on Saturday. The speech was occasioned by criticism of a production this Spring of Terrence McNally’s play Corpus [...]

This is Tapanga Jansen, a San Antonio video and social networking artist.     I’m a big fan of her idiosyncratic, deliberately lo-fi, subversively sophisticated short videos, as well as her penchant for speaking in all LOLCats-style pidgin. Here’s the first video of Tapanga’s I saw, “Where’s Lori?” (2010)   As you can see, Tapanga [...]

(All photos by John D. Fisch except where noted. Click high res gallery to view full images.) Dear readers of Glasstire, San Antonio prides ourselves (read: economically relies) on our status as a tourist destination. You likely already know this. You may have visited on an 8th grade band trip in 1985 during which you [...]