Page 16 - VOZ: Selections from The UTSA Art Collection

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Seen as a whole, the VOZ exhibition can be viewed as a powerful affirmation of the role artists and their work are playing in helping to unfold and reveal the destiny of a people, a story embodied in the three-hundred yearlong history of the city of San Antonio. It’s for each of us to tell our own version of that story, but these artists have given us a great imaginarium from which to draw our tales. In his vivid San Antonio Sampler (2016), Franco Modini-Ruiz depicts a San Antonio skyline of the mind, arranging the Tower of the Americas, the Tower-Life and other buildings on an impressionistic horizon. As we descend into this deep city palimpsest, mirages seem to appear, blood-red clouds, vaporous criss-crosses of elevated freeways, fragment of missions perhaps, fields of verdant green, hints of memories of a time before. It’s an image that reminds us of how long San Antonio has been a story in the making, a place of encounters between strangers, a protean cradle of our becoming, a beacon into the future.
VOZ gives evidence of how our artists may know this truth best.