Huichol Painting in the Rockefeller Latin American Collection. [Yarn and ceremonial art]. Courtesy of San Antonio Museum of Art. Photo by Ricardo Romo.
The San Antonio Museum of Art (SAMA) has nearly 90,000 square feet of gallery space and a permanent collection of over 30,000 objects. SAMA’s collections span over 5,000 years and comprise objects from the ancient Mediterranean, Asian, Latin American, contemporary, and other areas. The museum includes a superb Rockefeller Latin American collection installed in a 30,000‑square‑foot wing. The works of the five artists featured here are new to SAMA and are discussed for the first time in my newsletter.
Patrick Martinez, “Jaguar Guardian” [2024]. Courtesy of San Antonio Museum of Art. Photo by Ricardo Romo.
Patrick Martinez, a Pasadena-California-born, Los Angeles–based artist of Filipino, Mexican, and Native American heritage, has a new contemporary piece, “Jaguar Garden” [2024], featured in the SAMA collection. The Dallas Contemporary Museum noted, “Through his multidisciplinary practice, Martinez creates works that reflect on the ever-evolving landscapes of Los Angeles, considering the passage of time and its impact on the lived environment and consequently on the multicultural communities that call it home.”
Alberto Mijangos, “Rodeado de sonido / Surrounded by Sound.” Courtesy of San Antonio Museum of Art. Photo by Ricardo Romo.
Martinez’s mixed media work at SAMA includes a painting that incorporates distressed stucco, ceramic tile, vinyl signage, security bars, flowers, and other LA streetscape materials. SAMA curators noted that his “landscape” is created to evoke working‑class neighborhoods and their socio‑economic pressures. The curators explained, “The colorful neon lights, stucco, ceramic tiles, and faded graffiti in Patrick Martinez’s work appear to be taken directly from a local storefront.”
The array of materials and imagery Martinez uses to construct layered surfaces of his “landscape paintings” connects far-reaching time periods and histories in exploration of memory, cultural hybridity, and the changing urban landscape. Martinez also incorporates Mesoamerican imagery. The open-mouthed jaguar in the SAMA piece is drawn from the murals of the Cacaxtla archaeological site in Central Mexico (650-950).
Mario Pérez, “Encarnación.” Courtesy of San Antonio Museum of Art. Photo by Ricardo Romo.
Mexican artistic influences are evident in the works of several other Latino artists in the SAMA collection. Alberto Mijangos is listed as Mexican, perhaps more accurately, Mexican-born, having lived for many years in his adopted home of San Antonio, Texas. His “Rodeado de sonido / Surrounded by Sound,” an oil, acrylic, and mixed-media work on canvas, was completed in San Antonio in 1988.
Jesse Treviño, “El Alameda.” Courtesy of San Antonio Museum of Art. Photo by Ricardo Romo.
The SAMA curators note that in this painting, intense red and deep purple hues are accentuated by a richly textured surface. They explained that during the 1980s, “Mijangos began employing an abstracted T-shape as a compositional device to explore the expressive qualities of color in a series he referred to as ‘T-shirt’ works. The T-shape references a common T-shirt and the religious cross, imbuing abstract forms with spiritual and symbolic meaning. Mijangos spent his early years in Mexico City and eventually settled in San Antonio in the 1950s.
Mario Perez is a Texas painter and photographer rooted in the Rio Grande Valley with a long and active career in Houston and San Antonio art circles. He has had a parallel career working behind the scenes in museums and galleries as a preparator and installer. He studied graphic design in Houston and subsequently pursued painting and photography, exhibiting his work across Texas.
While living in Mexico City during the 1990s, Mario Perez was inspired by rotulistas (sign painters) and the landscape scenes he observed pictured on the backs of city buses. Perez recognized the art’s erosion by exhaust, weather, and time, and recognized the symbolic potential of the deteriorated landscapes, which he simulates by sanding down his paintings. In his SAMA painting, “Encarnación,” Perez draws attention to the illusion of representation on a flat surface by layering crisp lettering atop a faded image—a conceit echoed in the title, “Encarnación.” This signifies the concrete form of an abstract concept reflecting his interest in vernacular typography, commercial graphics, and street‑level visual culture between Texas and Mexico.
Jesse Treviño in his San Antonio studio [1988].Photo by Ricardo Romo.
Glasstire characterizes Perez’s paintings as materially dense, “messy” abstractions with streaks, blots, and pools of paint, often occupying square canvases that emphasize process, gravity, and accumulation. Perez’s paintings engage with ideas of foreground and background, surface and depth, allowing underlayers or previous decisions to remain visible as a kind of archaeological record of the art-making process.
Al Rendon, “Selena.” Courtesy of San Antonio Museum of Art. Photo by Ricardo Romo.
A large painting by Jesse Treviño of the San Antonio Mexican theater, “El Alameda” [1980], hangs in an alcove as visitors enter the SAMA Latin American Collection area. Treviño was born in Monterrey, Mexico, but moved to San Antonio at age five. He grew up on the city’s Westside and attended a Technical and Industrial High School where he studied commercial art. [I lived on the same street as Jesse Treviño’s family and attended the same high school two years ahead of him].
The Alameda Theater was completed in 1949 as a Spanish-language movie theater and performance space that promoted Mexican American culture. The beautiful, ornate Alameda was the city’s first desegregated movie venue. The Alameda Theater featured the best and newest Mexican movies. As a young boy in the 1950s, Treviño and his nine siblings frequently visited the movie house on Houston Street, along with Westside residents of all ages.
In Treviño’s painting of the iconic building, the Alameda is pictured in bright daylight with great precision and detail. The SAMA curators noted that the building’s “vibrant past is replaced by vacant windows and missing marquee panels that signal its impending closure.” Treviño recalled, “The year I painted it, it seemed like no one cared about it. That’s why I painted it.” His work monumentalizes an important site in an act of Latino cultural preservation.
Treviño is a renowned San Antonio artist whose paintings and large-scale public artworks have left an indelible legacy in this city and beyond. He gained prominence in the 1970s with photorealist depictions of people and places in the Latino community. The “El Alameda” painting is a gift of Ernest and Aimée Bromley to the SAMA Latin American art collection.
Al Rendon in his Southtown studio. Photo by Ricardo Romo.
In explaining another recent acquisition, SAMA curators noted that photographer Al Rendon’s gelatin silver 1993 portrait of Tejano music icon Selena Quintanilla-Pérez “exemplifies both celebrity iconography and a visual archive of Tejano cultural production in late twentieth-century Texas.”
Marisa Moran Jahn, SAMA “Gateway.” Courtesy of San Antonio Museum of Art. Photo by Ricardo Romo.
Rendon’s early 1980s assignments for the San Antonio Fiesta Commission deepened his connection to Mexican and Tejano experiences, which led to steady work with the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center. There, he documented annual conjunto festivals, ballet folklórico presentations, cinema festivals, and other cultural events. He photographed participants at the Guadalupe Center’s Inter‑American Book Fair, capturing writers such as Carlos Fuentes, Isabel Allende, and Maya Angelou.
Rendon’s photographs of Flaco Jiménez, Santiago Jiménez Jr., Emilio and Raulito Navaira, and especially a young Selena, mark milestones in Tejano music history. When Rendon took the 1993 photo of the young Selena, she had just released “Live!” [Selena Live!], an album that later won the 1994 Grammy Award for Best Mexican-American Album, making her the first female Tejano artist to win a Grammy.
SAMA curators recognize that Rendon’s photograph of Selena illustrates the “interplay of grace and fashion and underscores the negotiation between timeless self-presentation and the spectacle of performance. To her fans, Selena’s poised, self-assured presence embodies the aesthetics of Latina empowerment within the broader framework of US-Mexican visual culture.” The curators concluded, “This portrait merges documentary traditions with formal precision and emotional impact, securing Selena’s enduring role in regional and Transnational cultural memory.”
The Rendon Selena portrait is part of a donation to SAMA of over 550 serigraphs, lithographs, artist portfolios, and photographs by Chicano and Mexican artists that Harriett and I have acquired over five decades. We have collected Chicano and Mexican art for the past 56 years, with the intention of enjoying it in our home, supporting artists, and sharing our collection with museums, libraries, and universities so that others can know and appreciate this art.
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Copyright 2026 by Ricardo Romo.