Mark Menjívar’s Murmurations. Courtesy of Contemporary at Blue Star. Photo by Ricardo Romo.
Mark Menjívar’s Murmurations, a new, expansive, mid-career survey exhibition highlighting 16 multifaceted projects from his past 20 years, is currently open at the Contemporary at Blue Star in San Antonio. His work includes socially engaged art, photography, sound studies, capital punishment, migration, and ornithology. His creative artistry also integrates social practice and participatory collaborative projects to create intentional community building rather than studio-based production. Jacqueline Saragoza McGilvray curated this splendid exhibition.
Mark Menjívar’s Murmurations. Courtesy of Contemporary at Blue Star.
Menjívar, a UT San Antonio art professor, is known for engaging in long-term collaborations, oral histories, and community-based research to address topics such as access to food, capital punishment, migration, and border issues. In his long-term projects, he creates frameworks that bring together students, community groups, and leaders for critical dialogues about issues that affect their lives.
Over the last two decades, Menjívar has worked on over a dozen multifaceted projects. In the Contemporary mid-career survey, Blue Star curators highlighted a selection of projects, such as the refrigerator or photo project and the Luck Archive, and debuted new works.
Mark Menjívar, The Luck Archive. Courtesy of the artist.
The Luck Archive features collections of artifacts displayed that are not about being lucky or unlucky, Menjívar tells us. Rather, “It’s about the truths and lies we tell ourselves to feel safe, the hopes and dreams we carry, and the things that connect us and make us human.” Menjívar’s book, The Luck Archive,contributes to our understanding of the project’s purpose and outcomes. In a foreword to the book, artist Harrell Fletcher writes: Menjívar “has spent years engaging people in airplanes, bingo halls, grocery stores, tattoo shops, parks, and baseball stadiums, and on the streets and in their homes. The result is an ongoing exploration of the intersections between luck and the beliefs, superstitions, and traditions people hold dear.”
Mark Menjívar’s Luck Archive. Courtesy of Contemporary at Blue Star.
The physical Luck Archive contains more than 450 entrees that include rings, coins, clovers, charms, patches, underwear, sports superstitions, lottery strategies, day trader insights, animal stories, dolls, games, crystals, seeds, cigarettes, rainbows, and more, collected in photographs and accompanying explanation of the objects Menjívar admits that he created something from nothing, and about something that may be nothing, or may be more important than we could have known had he not made it obvious for us.
Mark Menjívar, The Refrigerator Project. Courtesy of Contemporary at Blue Star.
In his book, The Luck Archive: Exploring Belief, Superstition, and Tradition, Menjivar noted that the Luck project started over a decade ago when he began organizing the stories, objects, and photographs about people’s ideas about luck and good-luck objects into a publicly accessible collection.
Mark Menjívar, The Refrigerator Project. Courtesy of Contemporary at Blue Star.
Harrell Fletcher, who has followed Menjívar’s career for decades, noted that the San Antonio artist uses photography (and various other media and approaches) to explore aspects of life that are normally hidden from view. Today, especially with the advent and acceptance of socially engaged art practices, Fletcher wrote, it is possible to operate transparently, as Menjívar does, in more involved, inclusive, and participatory ways. The UT San Antonio professor has used his practice to investigate everything from the food in people’s refrigerators to the effects of the civil war in El Salvador.
Mark Menjívar, Migration. Courtesy of Contemporary at Blue Star. Photo by Ricardo Romo.
The first project that really crystallized Menjívar’s conceptual approach was the refrigerator photography work. While looking for food in his refrigerator, he thought about how the issues of food insecurity and hunger impacted so many Americans. In the early 2000s, Menjívar spent two years living in a Bolivian shantytown where 80 percent of the people lived at poverty levels, so food and hunger were not distant issues but part of daily life. He worked with San Antonio social justice advocate Michael Nye in Bolivia, spending time, listening, getting to know people aligned with his own values, and asking Nye how he might explore food.
Mark Menjívar, Migration. Courtesy of Contemporary at Blue Star. Photo by Ricardo Romo.
That project, which became known as “You Are What You Eat,” traveled widely, was published with Trinity University Press, and received national attention—from awards in Santa Fe to segments on Good Morning America, National Geographic, and NPR’s Splendid Table. Menjívar’s refrigerator images circulated in hundreds of magazines and went viral online years later. But for Menjívar, one of the most important lessons of that success was realizing that while the visibility mattered, what mattered even more was the integrity of the relationships and the processes in communities. The work taught him something about his own ego and about staying grounded in why he makes art in the first place.
Mark Menjívar, Migration. Courtesy of Contemporary at Blue Star. Photo by Ricardo Romo.
Another significant project featured in Murmuration is focused on bird migration. Menjívar told us that about five years ago, while walking along the San Antonio River Walk, he heard the song of a painted bunting—a small, brilliantly colored bird. This small bird breeds mainly in the southeastern and south‑central United States (including much of Texas) and winters farther south into Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean. Menjívar recognized the bird song, and it struck him that this tiny bird might have been heard by his family in Puerto Rico or El Salvador just a week earlier. The migration path of the painted bunting reminded him how close we actually are—far apart on a map, but connected through small creatures that move freely between our hemispheres.
That bird migration thought led to a project called La Misma Canción: The Same Song, exploring the interconnectedness of the Americas. A large fabric mural that covered a whole wall of the exhibit was constructed by young people in Prescott, Washington, in collaboration with artists Amanda Evans and Tia Kramer. The Prescott school serves a mostly migrant farmworker community—about seventy percent of the children are from families who came from Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean.
Mark Menjívar, “I Am for a Future…” Courtesy of Contemporary at Blue Star. Photo by Ricardo Romo.
Under Menjívar’s directions, the students began by drawing a map linking all the places their families came from. Together, they researched ten species of migratory birds that travel through those same regions each year. Rather than drawing freehand, the students traced the birds’ outlines using references from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, which also helped fund the project. Tracing leveled the playing field. Menjívar explained that this project required scanning hundreds of tracings and printing them on fabric using high-resolution digital printing—600 DPI, which gave the surface incredible clarity. The final banner, Menjívar proudly explained, welcomes migratory birds and honors the journeys that connect people.
Mark Menjívar, Murmuration. Courtesy of Contemporary at Blue Star. Photo by Ricardo Romo.
Early in his artistic career, Menjívar joined a collective called Borderline and began working near the U.S.–Mexico border. The group explored how to imagine borders differently—fluid, humane, even reversible. Inspired by Swedish-American artist Claes Oldenburg’s manifesto project “I Am For An Art…,” Menjívar began leading workshops where communities completed phrases like “I am for a border…” or “I am for a city…” The answers were poetic and profound. At the exhibit, Harriett and I read posted index cards that stated: “I am for a city that feels like a warm blanket,” and “I am for a border that rolls up like a rug and can be put away in the closet.” These collective writings become public installations—hundreds of voices shaping new civic and spiritual possibilities.
For this exhibition, Menjívar expanded the concept. He asked visitors to respond, “I am for a future…” Visitors to the Contemporary gallery are asked to add their own sentences to the walls—hoping aloud for a future of love, peace, or unity. Some even stay to talk about what it means to act on those hopes. Menjívar also asks visitors to respond to questions printed on a large picnic table, such as “If you’re caring for the planet, what small actions can you take today?”
Menjívar seems to be achieving his goal to realize art inspired by “social sculpture,” a concept from the artist Joseph Beuys. The concept suggests that art can shape society itself through ideas, words, and participation. Menjívar concluded by telling us: “Every project I do asks how we shape the world and one another. You’re shaping me right now just by listening and asking questions.”
_________________________________________________________________
Copyright 2026 by Ricardo Romo. All photo credits as indicated above.