Pabst Blue Ribbon continues its march through downtown San Antonio with an event later this month called the Mural Connection, an outdoor art walk presented in collaboration with the San Antonio Street Art Initiative (SASAI).
Pabst relocated its headquarters to San Antonio last year and has been busy in 2021 with a series of programs aimed to engage San Antonio’s arts community. These have included the launch of a full-time Southtown gallery space, which opened with an exhibition of Pabst Blue Ribbon can designs, and a weeklong immersive pop-up at downtown’s historic Aztec Theatre, which runs until Thursday (April 15).
As art, these early efforts have fallen somewhat flat: the gallery’s inaugural show was too heavily branded, the immersive “experience” marred by an aggressive metal detector and guard at entrance, and fizzling inside with an incoherent jumble of (independently interesting) installations optimized for Instagrammability.
San Antonio artist Charlie Kitchen evokes the Aztec’s history as a Roaring ’20s picture house in a site-specific installation. Photo: Josh Feola
Pabst may have more success with its next art event, scheduled for Saturday, April 24. The Mural Connection is a two-mile art walk covering original commissions from the San Antonio Street Art Initiative (SASAI) along a north-south axis, from the San Antonio Museum of Art to Pabst Blue Ribbon Studios in Southtown. Artists involved include 20-year San Antonio street art veteran and SASAI president Shek Vega, fellow San Antonio artists Angela Fox and Gary Sweeney, Pabst 2020 Art Can Contest winner Ashley Dreyfus, and more.
The event will run from 1-5 pm, with a scheduled stop for refreshments at immersive art gallery Hopscotch, where SASAI currently has an installation. The Mural Connection will end with an event at Pabst’s gallery featuring “prizes from SASAI, merchandise and additional artwork on display at the studio.”
The Mural Connection is free by reservation.
