RICARDO ROMO’S TEJANO REPORT 10.29.26 LATINO ART FOR THE FALL IN SAN ANTONIO AND TEXAS

Latino art has come of age in the Southwest and beyond, and October is a banner month for Chicano and Mexican art exhibitions in Texas. In mid-October, San Antonio galleries opened three exhibits devoted to the Latino experience. This essay covers the Mercardo/Materials exhibit at the Centro de Artes in San Antonio’s downtown Market Square, which presents the work of 15 artists, and the Briscoe Western Art Museum, which showcases a solo exhibit by San Antonio artist Kathy Sosa.

First, I take readers into the marvelous refurbished Centro de Artes exhibit space in downtown Market Square. The building dates back to 1922 when it was part of the Produce Market. Over the next forty years, merchants sold fresh produce to the city’s restaurants and small grocery stores at the Mercado.

In the mid-1950s, when I helped my family in their mom-and-pop grocery business, I visited the Mercado weekly to buy fruit, avocados, tomatoes, chiles, and other produce for our store. In the 1960s, the Market moved to the city’s Westside on Laredo Street. The Mercado building sat empty for decades, but in 2000 the city began to restore it as an art venue.

In September 2016, San Antonio’s Department of Arts & Culture began managing and programming exhibitions in the refurbished building. A new strategic framework emphasized San Antonio and South Texas artists, scholars, and curators as a central priority. The Department also stressed the importance of representation across Latino communities, generations, genders, and artistic perspectives. The art agency emphasized an open call for exhibition proposals rather than programming determined solely internally.

The strategic plan called for community oversight through a Centro de Artes committee. This effort connects the gallery’s public mission to opportunities for both emerging and established artists. The contemporary Centro exhibition model uses guest curators and a proposal-review process involving artists, arts professionals, and community members. Most importantly, the city provides dedicated municipal funding and broad public access.

The Centro’s mission remains focused on the Latino experience in the United States, especially South Texas, while also addressing transnational connections. Thus, the Centro is both a regional exhibition space and a venue for exploring broader questions of migration, borderlands identity, cultural adaptation, and persistence.

Over its ten years under city management, celebrated in 2026, the Centro de Artes reports 28 exhibitions featuring more than 3,100 artworks by approximately 600 artists. The anniversary of the Centro [2016-2026] celebrates a decade of the current operating model, although the institution’s antecedents— the building itself—are considerably older. Admission is free, but crowds are usually sparse because the Centro is still not well known among the city’s art community, and downtown parking is difficult and expensive.

Mia Lopez, Latinx Curator for the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio, served as the Mercado Materials exhibition organizer. Her selection of paintings, sculptures, and photographs included well-known artists such as Chuck Ramirez, Al Rendon, and Eva Marengo Sanchez, as well as numerous emerging artists.

Lopez wrote that the exhibit drew on “the rich history of Centro de Artes Gallery, situated in San Antonio’s historic Market Square.” She offered that the exhibition “reframes the market’s visual abundance through a Pop Art lens.” The artwork of Chuck Ramirez and Eva Marengo Sanchez falls into the category of what Lopez referred to as challenging “reductive expectations by deconstructing materials, creating conceptual homages, and reimagining representation.” Sanchez’s paintings of fruit cups and ice cream sundaes are brilliantly realistic, and only the large sizes reveal they are representations.

Al Rendon’s photographs of Market Square focus on the vendors and salespeople responsible for the commercial activity of the Square. Just steps away from the Centro’s entrance are shops and small booths selling a wide variety of goods, foods, and drinks. In the Square, cowboy hats, T-shirts, and Mexican dresses are popular. The Market is one of the best places to buy aguas frescas [fruit drinks] and raspas [ice cones]. Rendon’s photographs of women preparing fajitas and serving tamales in the Market Square capture the persistence and continuity of Mexican culture.

The striking Mexican blue folkloric skirt paintings by the Ramirez sisters [Manola and Maria] are excellent representations of what Lopez sought in Mercado Material. Manola and Maria are best known to San Antonio’s Southsiders for their murals, but at their Southtown studio and gallery, they feature art products such as paintings, jewelry, textiles, and clay dishes.

The Briscoe Western Art Museum is a short distance from Market Square, but its location on the San Antonio Riverwalk and walking distance to the Alamo give it a special aura. A large selection of stunning bronze statues of cowboys and American Indians on horses surround the museum. Harriett and I attended a preview of Kathy Sosa’s solo exhibit, Revolutionary Women of Texas and Mexico, on October 12, 2026, the same day as the Centro de Artes show and a Centro Cultural Aztan exhibit opening. Sosa spent the past year painting the 26 colorful works in the show, and by all accounts of the preview audience, the exhibit is a stunning success.

 

Kathy Sosa’s art journey began in the mid 1980s in San Antonio. In an interview with Texas Public Radio, she told Norma Martinez and Marian Navarro that her art career didn’t begin until after her mid-40s, when she began working with Sosa, Bromley, Aguilar & Associates [Lionel Sosa, Ernest Bromley, and Al Aguilar], a pioneering Hispanic advertising agency based in San Antonio. Kathy Sosa’s first major assignment with the firm focused on the Mira! The Canadian Club Hispanic Art Tour, which exhibited at El Museo del Barrio in New York City and at the San Antonio Museum of Art. Sosa told TPR, “It was my first exposure to Latino artists and the symbolism and themes of Latino culture, and specifically the borderland. I was just in love, just in love from then on.”

For the past two decades, Sosa has tirelessly explored borderland culture through painting, mixed media, public art and sculpture. In an interview with the San Antonio Art League & Museum, she explained, “I spend my creative energy celebrating blended culture, specifically that of the Texas-Mexico Borderland, which has been my home since childhood. Inspiration here is ubiquitous, unceasing, and unflinching.”

In the Briscoe exhibit, Sosa’s art is alive with color. Portraits of powerful women feature bright blues, pinks, yellows, and greens. Numerous paintings incorporate a Tree of Life decorative design. Sosa once explained that the Tree of Life expresses the women’s interior lives: “Each tree of life incorporates a set of thematic figures that represents what the woman is thinking or obsessing about at the imagined moment.” In a January 3, 2025 interview on Texas Public Radio’s Fronteras, Sosa explained, “Almost everything I paint that features a woman is designed to say, ‘Women are strong and at the center of everything good’.”

Sosa’s art also draws on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Spanish and Mexican portraiture, religious imagery, masks, and folk art. Her remarkable portraiture, “Hermanas del Alma,” links the hearts [and souls] of the highly venerated Virgin de Guadalupe to Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, a Mexican poet, playwright, scholar, and Catholic nun widely regarded as one of the greatest writers of colonial Latin America.

 

There is much to see in Kathy Sosa’s work. She is also known for her Huipile paintings, which celebrate both “intricately woven and embroidered Meso-American textiles” and contemporary American women who admire, collect, and wear them. These Huipile paintings, Sosa explained, connect textile traditions with present-day identity rather than treating the garments solely as historical artifacts.