The artists have always played this pivotal role of envisioning a new way of understanding ourselves and our communities.

Our relationship to this history, so many of our artists really make that the centerpiece of their visions.

We.

San Antonio's origins lie in its historic missions, all of which we treasure, and one of which we remember as the Alamo.

It was in that of Mexico that the Spanish missionaries were taught the languages and the customs, and the indigenous populations they would encounter here.

It was in get it that or that they learned the survival skills they would need to travel north to the outer boundaries of New Spain to establish these missions.

It was there where the San Antonio of today to grew and grew.

And it is there that the San Antonio's blended culture was born.

Simply put, if it weren't for Katrina, there would be no missions, no Alamo, and no San Antonio.

Now, after more than 300 years, we rediscover and celebrate San Antonio's deep connection with Kitaro through artistic and cultural expression.

A reunion three centuries in the making.

I always knew it was going to be an artist.

Who from?

From a very young age.

I just knew that this was the life for me.

I would draw really large pictures on my parents walls.

With crayons.

And now, when I smell bleach and water, I think of my childhood because my mom always had me cleaning the walls.

The reason I do this is just because I have to.

I just have this thing that needs to get out of me.

I grew up with my father doing woodcarving that he learned when he was in Mexico, and so I emulated that.

I wanted to be an artist, too.

It all starts with not being good with sports.

My family is a family of very hard workers.

They did not see art as work.

They saw it as a waste of time.

I went to first grade and the first assignment the teacher gave us was to draw from our book.

Our reading book.

So I got my crayons and I drew it.

Then I looked to my right and to my left and they weren't doing anything.

I said, you are going to get in trouble.

Then I realized, oh, I realized later, oh, they couldn't draw and I didn't realize I had a talent.

I will work in the summertime.

And the field, I started drawing stuff like that.

I would see Diego Rivera and, books about freedom, them and, and how they would, do paintings of the fields and stuff like that, and people and Aztecs and stuff with the corn.

So I kind of I relate to that.

And there was a lot of Latinos there.

So they kind of did the same thing, and it just kind of was normal for me to do stuff like that during high school.

And I was that's when I got into art.

I knew that creativity needed to be somehow, devoured by my community.

I quickly got interested in murals.

One we ended up doing, you know, the mural projects on the West Side.

And those became a whole nother approach to image making and painting.

But then the other part that was very important was distribution and distribution of of, of the imagery was so important.

And that's where printmaking became a whole thing for me.

And ever since then, it's just been amazingly beautiful just to like get the work out there.

As a Chicano artist, I have been very much influenced by, Mexican printmakers.

They were some of the first prints I ever saw.

I knew right then and there that I was supposed to be a printmaker, and that that was part of me somehow.

A lot of the women in my works are me, but they are my mother, and they're my daughter.

Like, they're, composite characters of the experiences that we've gone through.

And so the images where I make up my mother or my mother's experiences, they I now I understand them more now that I'm older because, you know, as you get older and if your parents have passed, you realize things about their life that you didn't know before.

I am a plein air artist.

I paint on location.

What I see I don't complete on location, but I'll be there for a couple of days and work at my studio.

I also do portraits of people who sit in front of me.

I love telling people that I did my solo a self-portrait in 1972.

And my mom had come home from work.

She was tired and reading the newspaper like this, like a mom.

I did a self-portrait, and without putting the paper down, she goes, cute.

And you probably noticed on Facebook that I put the word cute on everything, but that's from my mom.

I have always been a photographic artist.

I loved rock and roll photography, but I mixed and mingled with people who were artists who those rock and roll photographers as far as I was concerned, were artists.

They were creative people and they expected me to be creative about their images.

So it was never a problem having to choose between photography and art.

I can't choose.

This is one thing about a self-taught woodcarver, is that your models are around you and sometimes yourself.

You don't have any particular person or whatever, but sometimes they're in your thoughts.

In your mind you'll carve that.

I try to do a lot of ideas.

Lost things, lost, stories.

When I first started carving samples, I carved just primarily samples.

But as it evolved, now I'm carving stories and things that I want to pass on.

It's like, the relative, the promise of the Alamo and the things that I want to pass on to a younger generation.

They remember that, hey, these things happened here.

You know, there were there were Hispanics at the Alamo.

We had Mexican Americans here.

I paint the stories of my family.

Here he is catching a, a bear.

He lassoed a bear on a ranch that he worked in.

If you see, he he didn't shoot it.

He lasso did, but they rolled him up in the newspaper, and he was able to capture the bear because he was dangerous.

I mean, he could kill people.

So he was a hero that, you know, that protected the people.

Art has been an important way that I've used, images in my classes, on the borderlands, on migration studies to show an image that will resound in someone's mind with students minds.

They remember those potent images much better than something that they read in a textbook, or something that that doesn't really resonate with them as a person.

In their experience.

Mel is best known for a series of monumental paintings known as Human Scapes, and it had a very interesting origin.

He was just driving down a road.

He looked up for an instant, and he saw a drive in screen, and a woman was speaking in close up, but it looked like she was munching on the trees in the foreground.

And so that inspired more than 150 monumental paintings done over a period of almost 25 years.

And then the works that are featured in this exhibition are what he called the southwestern clichés.

So in these southwestern clichés, he tried to distill the essence of ideas about the southwest, and it has a tremendous sense of place, often Mexican inspired experiences.

The connection between Mexico and San Antonio.

I love to paint murals because there is more opportunity to tell a story.

I also love that they are public, so any we don't have to have money to go and visit most murals.

Anyone can go.

They really are.

For the communities that there.

Are placed in.

You know, San Antonio has a really large community of muralists.

Because I haven't been doing murals that long, relatively.

I wasn't really a part of that scene.

Was in the summer of 2022 when, after the shooting at Robb Elementary in Uvalde happened.

They were looking for artists from Texas to paint the 21 victims.

And I remember, I wrote why I wanted to paint a Mary Jo Garza in particular, and I really wanted I felt move as a parent myself, I really wanted to be a part of that.

And so when I went to Uvalde, I got to meet artists that felt like equally passionate about it and wanted to, you know, what can you do when something that horrible happens?

What can you do to be part of the healing?

And so I saw that is a great opportunity.

I did teach art for 15 years, and I would always tell my students, art is the one subject that encompasses all of the understandings of humanity, of how we record ourselves, how we, you know, depict ourselves, how we understand science, how we calculate with math, how, we write about our, our lives.

Jesse had a particular eye for the beauty of our community that is is really emerges out of a segregated part of San Antonio's history.

For Jesse, this was important.

It was an important part of how the world would begin to see us.

Now, we want to remember that when Jesse goes to New York before the Vietnam War, he's taught by William Draper, who's the painter of kings and presidents and, military battles.

Jesse was able to take that that, that stature that gets embedded in where you paint John F Kennedy and and see that in a building, because in a building, he's not necessarily seeing what we would see as the structure.

He's seen the personality of the community.

Paintings that begin to, present a sense of pride, not necessarily for people that are trying to understand us, but for those of us that somehow in our own hearts, we see exactly what it is that he sees.

So for Jesse, these are not landscapes, or streetscapes.

They are the, the the breathing entity of the community.

And this dialog begins the unfolding of, I think, what the world and what San Antonio, now is able to look at itself and appreciate itself and see the grandeur of all levels of wherever it is that that you are in San Antonio.

I'm from San Antonio, the west side of San Antonio.

I always feel I have to make a point to say that I'm from the West Side, because it's very important in my art where I'm from.

One thing that I learned from Jesse through Neal, especially when he was driving because he'd be driving.

And then we oh, look at that beautiful flower on the.

And I look at the road, look at the road.

And he would just be in all with his surroundings.

And that's something that you have to learn as an artist is to look, is to take a good look at everything.

And one day I left the house early in the morning and I saw this prostitute.

She looked beautiful.

And then, I came home for lunch and she was on another part of what?

I leave the street.

She still looked beautiful.

Then when I was coming home late at night, she was still out there.

So I did a series of paintings of this woman.

I put her on all the street corners on my lupus street.

It's a five little series of paintings of this woman, and if there's no judgment, it's almost a taboo subject.

And people shy away from those things, but I don't.

I think it's interesting and it's just life and it happens in my backyard.

I am not embarrassed to say that in college it was my white boyfriend who said, you need to learn your mother tongue again and what most of us lack.

Those Chicanos, Mexican Americans who lost their mother tongue is that cognitive academic language proficiency where we were, I could talk to another artist about engravings in Taglio woodblock and know all the the technological terms for it.

So for me, my imagery was something about wanting to investigate that, you know, investigate that loss of language and regaining it again.

I first encountered, Willis de la Vida in a book that I bought about this topic, the ceramic Trees of Life from Mexico.

And the forms were so, beautiful and intricate and, and reading about it, you know, the, the provenance of the tree of life and so many of the trees of life that you encounter are about, the creation of the world.

It became apparent that trees of life are really lovely.

That had evolved to something that could tell any kind of story and occurred that to me, that the form of the oral vida could make a wonderful headdress or crown flower crown like the flower crowns that the the nuns had in Mexico.

Or the way I like to think of it as a thought bubble.

So the person, the primary person in the painting, what they are thinking about or obsessing about at the time, I consider myself a Mexican American photographer.

I can't escape the culture of San Antonio.

I mean, that's we have so much diversity in San Antonio.

And when I've been asked to do commercial work at like Fiesta, covering Fiesta, I discovered the other.

And that led to a whole series of artwork that led to a book.

And it's been very popular.

It's been very well received, and it just led me to more to want more, like most events in San Antonio, incorporate some kind of art.

I feel like if San Antonio has elevated celebration to an art form itself, everything is sort of like a performance.

And UN and Gwen throw on living activation a lot of people like to express themselves with clothing, with jewelry, with what they're wearing.

And what I choose to pay homage to is a culture from Mexico.

Because, you know, if I do abstract expressionism, that's already been done.

That has nothing to do with my culture, that has nothing to do with my art, nothing to do with my soul.

I respect its place in art history, but that, like I always say, that's their art.

So my art is a reflection of Mexican culture from my perspective.

The reason why I make the artwork that I make is because I am attempting to make connections with my ancestral past, my cultural lineage, oral tradition, language and music, all the things that give me a sense of who I am.

I gave myself a artistic prompt many years ago to reinvent myself from the collage based work I was making as an undergrad, into making things that had more conceptual weight to them.

At the time, I was exploring my identity as a Latino and somebody who was identified as a Texan, and I stumbled upon the carved wood esthetic painting, carved wood painting esthetic that I employ today.

I think all skin colors are beautiful.

They're all creation of God, you know, that's his art is embedded in our skin.

I'm just totally trying to show a different something different with through my work and just show the beauty in all of us and the magnificence and all of us.

Art can really help bridge cultures and create connection to our shared humanity.

My wife Kathy and I live in San Antonio, but we also live in Peru because we love both cities, so much.

We love both country so much.

And that's why this exhibition I Largo de la speck on the other side of the mirror, is an exhibition that binds our two cities together.

It is an exhibition that tells a story about two cities and how much history there is between them.

It's a great opportunity for the people of San Antonio to get to know more about the people from from the get it to know more about the people of San Antonio.

When two spirits from different places joined together in a piece of art, I think that's one of the most beautiful things that can happen to to people that they show, they see on the other side of the mirror what their brothers and sisters are living in the other side of the border.

It is incredibly important to be, woven into the fabric of the San Antonio art scene and to be acknowledged by my peers.

There are many of them, that I walk in their footsteps.

It's a incredibly important to be part of, exhibitions and opportunities like this.

It strengthens our San Antonio, our community.

I think this is a really special opportunity to show our work in Mexico, because it's not something that we get to do often.

You know, I, I this is the first time I've really heard of an organized effort to do something like that.

Again, that's part of it's also part of creating a dialog, you know, maybe we'll next have artists from get that are having a show here in San Antonio.

We can meet them and, and see what inspires them, you know.

And do they know the connection to send?

Do they know they're responsible for the missions and all of that?

I'm hoping that first of all, they'll like what they see.

And second of all, that they will feel a connection that what we are here in San Antonio is not much different than them.

In other words, they're going to feel a similarity.

They're going to feel comfortable, they're going to like it.

They're going to just hopefully get get a good feeling for me to show my work in Mexico.

Those are the people that inspired me to do the work, those people, those places.

And that's what my work is about.

It's celebrating them that I, my career as an artist was started because I lived in Mexico City for a period.

I didn't know that what was going to come out of that was, a career as a painter.

But it was such a formative experience in how I understand myself and how I understand my culture and and what's important to me.

So the opportunity after seven years or something of hard work of of working on my craft to have something to offer, have something to bring back means so much to me.

It feels like a returning of a gift, almost.

Being invited to be part of this exhibit is like being invited to someone's home, and I appreciate that invitation.

My message to get at Dinos, who are coming to see the wonderful San Antonio artists in the museum, is to come and reunite with your family.

Perhaps you didn't know, but we've been here, and we want to celebrate what has made us one family in this diaspora of Mexico in the United States, specifically San Antonio, and Go Retro.

I hope the experience is is like looking in a mirror.

When I do the DNA research and I see that I have all these primos there in northern Mexico that I don't know, and that I may never even going to really know someday.

But they're we're primas, we're connected.

And I'm very proud that that that we're still here.

You know, we still cling to our culture.

We haven't forgotten.

And so when I think about culture, I think about the complexities.

And and I'm no longer doing well.

This is Spanish.

This is English.

No I'm more I'm pushing border.

So in between this that that is the identity.

Like the idea of hopscotch makes more sense to me than to be able to pick a side.

If I would to say you do this to your soul, your nail.

Are you an American?

Yes.

Are you a Mexican?

Yes.

What do you paint?

I paint the people from Mexico and from the US that have Mexican blood.

I paint the histories.

I paint the future.

And I paid the present because all of this is something that the world should understand and know how dependent we are on one another for our families, for language, for culture, for history, for art, for food and everything that is relevant to one country is also relevant and important to the other country.

Peace in communities is directly related to the connections and relationships that we make with people, and so the most important infrastructure that we can build are the bridges that we create between communities.

It's the relationships that we have built over time in Mexico that remind us that this is the foundation for peace in North and Central and South America.

It's the family bonds.

It's the bonds that we create between residents in these communities that are going to sustain us for peace forever.

For.