On October 23, 2024, St. Philip’s College in San Antonio opened the Romo Gallery in the new Cybersecurity building on campus. St. Philip’s President Adena Loston, a visionary leader at the Historically Black College, conceived the idea to present Latino art at her Eastside campus which today has a large Latino enrollment. Her decision to honor Harriett and me with a permanent gallery followed our gift of 261 works of art to the college in 2018.
At the opening ceremonies, President Loston allowed us a few minutes to discuss how we became interested in Latino art and why we believe that donating art serves the public good. Since moving to San Antonio in 1999, we have donated over 1,200 works of art to local museums, nonprofit organizations, libraries, and universities.
Our art journey began fifty-five years ago when Harriett and I walked into a Los Angeles gallery and bought a Mexican lithographic by Rufino Tamayo. We had visited the Lewin Gallery a half-dozen times in pursuit of Francisco Zuniga’s work, one of the few Mexican artists we were familiar with. Lewin no longer carried Zuniga prints, and he recommended Tamayo. We were interested only in works on paper because, as school teachers living in a $90-a-month apartment, the more expensive original paintings were out of our reach.
Our passion for learning about Mexican art began that day when we left Lewin Gallery with our Tamayo print [which we bought on layaway]. That year we took our entire savings and booked a trip to Europe on a special discount flight for teachers. We stayed in inexpensive hotels following the guidelines in the travel book, Europe On Five Dollars A Day. While walking on the Left Bank in Paris, we discovered an antique bookstore with small prints by Rufino Tamayo. We bought four at five dollars each [current value is over $1000 each]. We learned that the more one knows about a specific artist, the better for making unplanned purchases.
When we began buying art, we simply chose art that pleased us. We did not have a collection strategy. Over the years 1970-1980, we purchased one or two art pieces a year. In the first half of the 1970s, we were both in graduate school at UCLA paying tuition with our savings. During the second half of the 1970s, we had new entry jobs and little extra cash for non-essential purchases.
Although we consider ourselves “accidental collectors,” our path to collecting Chicano art was planted in 1975 with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art exhibit, “ChicanoArt!” After viewing the exhibit and meeting some artists, I requested and received funding from the Humanities Dean at the University of California San Diego [UCSD] where I taught in the History Department. With a modest grant and volunteer help from Spanish Professor Juan Rodriguez and Art Department graduate student Yolanda Lopez, Harriett and I curated a Chicano art exhibit called Arte Picante. We benefitted greatly from meeting with Sister Karen Bocaldero, the founder of Self-Help Graphics in East Los Angeles, who connected us with L. A.artists. The exhibit included nearly 50 Latino artists and drew 1,000 visitors on opening day in 1976 at the new Mandeville Center at UCSD.
We loved living in Southern California, but Texas was home. We left San Diego in 1980 when I was offered a UT Austin History Department post. Harriett was completing her dissertation at UC San Diego focused on Mexican immigrant families with young children. She completed her research in 1985 and began working at UT Austin. We met up with Austin artists, including Amado Pena whose Taller Gallery was a meeting place for many Chicano artists. Our friend, Sociologist Gilbert Cardenas, also opened Galleria Sin Fronteras in East Austin in 1985 and brought Chicano artists for exhibits.
In 1992, Latino artist Sam Coronado approached us about helping him buy a house in East Austin for a studio and gallery. Harriett and I provided the down payment and he launched his Serie Project, a nonprofit printmaking program that awarded funds and residencies to Latino artists. Over the next twenty-five years, the Serie Project hosted more than 300 artist residencies and produced hundreds of serigraph prints. The artists included Vincent Valdez, Malaquias Montoya, Cesar Martinez, Ester Hernandez, Pepe Coronado, Celia Alvarez Munoz, Ricky Armendariz, and Rubio. Our interest in collecting Latino art began seriously as we helped Coronado with an additional purchase of three portfolios with 250 prints each. The purchase enabled us to donate these portfolios [750 prints] to UT Austin Benson’s Latin American Collection, The McNay Art Museum, and the San Antonio Museum of Art.
During the 1990s, Harriett and I both taught at the University of Texas at Austin, and we continued to pursue our interest in Latino Art. We remained in touch with artists we had met in Los Angeles, San Diego, and Oakland with the help of my former student, Richard Duardo, who had established an important West Coast printing operation, Modern Multiples. We committed to buying numerous prints a year. During these years we met Luis Jimenez, a UT Austin graduate like us, and bought several of his prints. We connected with fellow UT Austin professor Ken Hale who printed the work of Amado Pena and Luis Jimenez and helped us acquire works by California artist Patsy Valdez.
In 1999, Harriett and I moved to San Antonio when I was hired as President of the University of Texas at San Antonio [UTSA]. Harriett accepted a post with the Sociology Department and served as the founding Director of the UTSA Mexico Center. Her involvement with the Mexico Center enabled us to visit Mexican universities, museums, and galleries regularly.
The first undergraduate students entered UTSA in 1974 and 25 years later when I arrived the campus was still in its early growing stages. Over the 18 years of my presidency, the campus experienced significant student enrollment, expanding from 18,000 in 1999 to 33,000 in 2017. As we built new classroom buildings, we added
new art to the campus. The State of Texas allowed a one percent set aside of the cost of new buildings to purchase interior furniture or art. UTSA’s first new building cost $50 million, so we set aside $500,000 for interior furniture and art. By the end of 2017 when I retired, UTSA had added more than 2,000 artworks to the campus, the majority by Latino artists.
We hope that our legacy of Chicano art gifts to libraries, college campuses, and art museums will enable others to know these artists, learn more about their work, and gain an appreciation of their art. We hope a wider audience will come to honor and love this art as much as we have over the years. We believe that Latino artists contribute to a deeper understanding of Latino experiences, Latino communities, and Latino culture.
