RICARDO ROMO’S TEJANO REPORT 1.24.26 CHICANO AND MEXICAN ART AT MCNAY MUSEUM

The McNay Art Museum, founded in 1954 as Texas’s first modern art museum, occupies Marion Koogler McNay’s Spanish Colonial Revival mansion in San Antonio. The museum is situated on 24 landscaped acres, featuring courtyards, a fish pond, and a beautiful nature garden. The museum’s collection of over 20,000 artworks showcases 19th- and 20th-century European and American modernism, contemporary art, prints, drawings, and theatre arts. Artists represented include Cézanne, Picasso, Matisse, van Gogh, O’Keeffe, and Rivera.

Phoenix, Arizona artist Fausto Fernandez grew up in the twin border cities of El Paso/Juárez and maintains deep ties to the regional art scene through his studio practice and public commissions. He earned dual BFAs in graphic design and painting from the University of Texas at El Paso in 2001, commuting daily across the border during his studies, an experience that continues to inform his work’s layered sense of movement, translation, and border crossing.

Fernandez identifies as a mixed-media collage artist, working primarily in painting, public art, and community‑engagement projects.​ He frequently works in series, drawing on mathematics, technology, border culture, Navajo textiles, mythology, and community life. Figurative and abstract elements interweave as metaphors for human interaction and social dynamics.​ Fernandez’s borderlands upbringing informs recurring interest in U.S.–Mexico crossings, infrastructure, and shared everyday experiences, such as border crossing traffic and the port‑of‑entry environment.​

Fernandez’s composition on display at the McNay, “Burden Narratives While Stuck in Traffic in Pursuit of an Obligation at the Port of Entry” [2023], includes collages, paper, and paint to depict a traffic jam at the US-Mexico border. The McNay curator noted that Fernandez “positions the border as a third space, or a transition between cultures.” Abstracted images of cars are layered as if they are lanes of traffic, using repetition to call to mind the tedium of waiting to cross the border. The colors and textures Fernandez employs recall rusted metal or pools of oil, an aesthetic present in many of the artist’s works.

Fernandez’s paintings have been described as vibrant “explosions of color,” where translucent layers of paint partially obscure and reveal archival images and his own photographs, producing a dynamic interplay between control and spontaneity. His diagrams, schematics, and blueprints are used as metaphors for systems, rituals, and the architectures of contemporary life. In some series, he incorporates materials such as asphalt or gunpowder, linking his abstractions to ideas of infrastructure and fragility.

Another Borderland artist born and raised in San Antonio, Nivia González, demonstrated extraordinary artistic talent from an early age, holding her first solo exhibition at the San Antonio Witte Museum at just seventeen while a student at Alamo Heights High School. She went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in studio art from San Antonio’s Trinity University, attended the Cooper Union art program in New York City, and completed a master’s degree in art education at the University of Texas at Austin.

González rose to prominence during the 1980s and early 1990s and was a nationally recognized Latina visual artist. She created the artwork for the covers of notable books such as The House on Mango Street (1983) and Woman Hollering Creek (1991) by Sandra Cisneros and By the Light of My Father’s Smile (1998) by Alice Walker. Rejecting the romanticized stereotypes often imposed on women of color, González’s paintings asserted dignity and cultural pride.

Sandra Cisneros’s book with Nivia Gonzalez’s image. Courtesy of the McNay Art Museum. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

One of Gonzalez’s most significant achievements was the founding of the Bexar County Jail Arts program in 1986, where she taught art to inmates in the Bexar County criminal justice system. Through the guidance of Gonzalez, a group of inmates created a large-scale mural that was used as the backdrop for Pope John Paul II’s visit to San Antonio in 1987.

Beyond gallery circles, Gonzalez’s art appeared in settings ranging from the Smithsonian Latino Center in Washington, D.C. to community spaces and cultural centers. At the height of her career, González received numerous public art commissions and continued to produce new work with the help of her twin daughters, who occasionally assisted her in her studio. A devastating car accident in 1997 caused a traumatic brain injury and partial paralysis of her dominant hand, but after nearly a decade of rehabilitation, she resumed painting, continuing to create radiant portraits of Latina women with enduring devotion and grace.

Nivia Gonzalez, Untitled. Courtesy of the McNay Art Museum. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

Gonzalez’s colorful piece at the McNay includes a framed portrait of the Virgin of Guadalupe overlooking a tabletop still life of watermelon, fish, and papaya.

The McNay curators have long admired the talent of El Paso Latino artist Luis Jimenez, and the museum has numerous works by him, including his famous “Man on Fire” sculpture in the patio sculpture garden.

The large alligator print by Jiménez [which Harriett and I proudly donated to the museum] is currently on display in the McNay Print Gallery. The alligator has an interesting history. From the 1880s to the 1960s, El Paso’s San Jacinto Plaza housed live alligators, making the plaza a popular tourist attraction featured in newspapers and postcards. By the 1960s, city officials relocated the alligators to the city zoo due to safety concerns.

In the 1990s, Jiménez was commissioned by the City of El Paso to create a public artwork commemorating the plaza’s historic live-alligator fountain.​ The resulting sculpture, commonly called Los Lagartos or Plaza de los Lagartos, consists of fiberglass life-size alligators placed at the center of the plaza, explicitly honoring the former alligator fountain. Jiménez’s work on the alligator sculpture led him to create the large alligator lithographic print, which is currently on display at the McNay.

Jiménez’s father’s electric sign company, located a few short blocks from the Rio Grande, specialized in neon signs, a trade and business that the senior Jiménez hoped to pass on to his talented son. The young Luis Jiménez grew up in El Paso learning how to spray paint, weld, and mold glass in his father’s shop.

In 1965 Jiménez journeyed to Mexico City to study art. In Mexico City, the leading art capital of Latin America, Jiménez found himself surrounded by a vibrant artistic culture. On the UNAM campus where he studied, bold and colorful murals by David Alfaro Siquiros dominated one of the entryways.

After the stay in Mexico City, Jiménez journeyed to New York City, where he joined a highly dynamic art scene heavily influenced by pop art. Jiménez was one of many struggling artists living in New York City during the late 1960s. In New York, Jiménez constructed the seven-foot-tall Man on Fire bronze sculpture.

Jiménez was influenced by watching television in horror as monks set themselves on fire in protest against the Vietnam War. Jiménez explained in one of his interviews that the sculpture, on a universal level, serves as a visual symbol of courageous action in the face of oppression and recognized the disproportionately large numbers of Chicanos who were drafted into the military and sent to Southeast Asia.

On June 13, 2006, Jiménez was working in his studio in Hondo, New Mexico on a large commissioned mustang sculpture for the Denver Airport when the massive 50-foot sculpture slipped off a rope and fell on him, crushing him to death. We are grateful that Jiménez’s work lives on in his numerous sculptures, paintings, and lithographs on view in museums and public spaces, as well as in numerous publications about borderland artists.

Los Angeles artist Frank Romero’s “Bailando” [Dancing], a watercolor on paper, is also currently featured in the McNay Print Gallery. The work portrays a joyful couple dancing to the music of two Mexican musicians, one with a red guitar and his companion with an accordion.

Romero is one of the most multifaceted and talented Chicano artists of his generation. In his 50 plus years as an artist, he has produced exceptional works as a painter, a sculptor, a ceramicist, a muralist, a graphic designer, a draftsman, and a photographer. Romero’s art has been exhibited in major U.S., European, and Japanese galleries.

From his teen years on, Romero always thought about becoming an artist. At age fifteen, while attending Roosevelt High School in Boyle Heights, he began taking weekend and evening art classes at the Otis Art Institute. While attending Cal State Los Angeles, Romero worked part-time with the Los Angeles County Student Professional Program, where he was assigned work in graphic design, photography, and archival management.

Romero met the talented Chicano artist Carlos Almaraz at Cal State, and Almaraz was a central figure in major collaborative art projects in later years. Romero moved to New York City in 1968 and found work in design and production for Penguin Books and later as Assistant Art Director for Ballantine Books. When Romero returned to Los Angeles in 1970, he joined A&M Records as a creative designer.

In 1973, Romero, Almaraz, Roberto de la Rocha, and Gilbert “Magu” Lujan formed an art collective which they named Los Four. Their 1974 exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Four: Almaraz/ de la Rocha/ Lujan/Romero, was a breakthrough for Chicano art. Los Four was the first Chicano exhibit in a major U.S. museum and the first to receive mainstream media coverage. The planning and successful opening of the Los Four exhibition complemented the opening of the Exposición Chicanarte exhibit in 1975 at the Los Angeles Municipal Gallery that also included works by Romero.

East Los Angeles neighborhood near Frank Romero’s studio. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

The McNay Art Museum has the work of these and other Chicano artists in its permanent collection, and the curators continue to find creative exhibits that feature Latino art.

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Copyright 2026 by Ricardo Romo. All images courtesy of Ricardo Romo.