Provided by Centro de Artes Gallery
Rudy Treviño hails from the border town of Eagle Pass, and moved to San Antonio at age 14 where he graduated from Fox Technical High School several years after Almazán and Esquivel. The budding artist then studied with noted painter Mel Casas (1929-2014) at San Antonio College where he earned his Associate of Arts degree. Treviño later pursued higher education at the University of Texas, Austin, receiving his BFA in 1973, and at the University of Texas, San Antonio, where he earned his MFA in 1976, the first student to do so. Treviño worked at San Antonio’s Sidney Lanier High School as an art teacher for twenty-three years, where he supervised an extensive mural program within the high school in the late 1970s.
Treviño began showing his work as early as 1964 and was published in one of the first surveys of Mexican-American art, Jacinto Quirarte’s 1973 Mexican American Artists. Three years later, the artist participated in the 1976 touring exhibition “Raíces antiguas, visiones nuevas = Ancient Roots, New Visions” produced by Washington, D.C.’s Fondo del Sol, a show that traveled to ten locations and was touted as the “first major exhibition of works by contemporary artists of Hispanic descent from throughout the United States and Puerto Rico.” He also received important early recognition when his work was included in the ground-breaking 1990 national touring exhibition “Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation,1965-1985” (CARA).
Bio is an excerpt from the catalogue essay, “Los Maestros de San Antonio” by Dr. Ann Marie Leimer.
On February 13, the Department of Arts & Culture installed two landmark exhibits addressing Chicano arts at its Centro de Artes gallery in Market Square. XicanX: New Visions challenges previous and existing surveys of Chicano and Latino identity-based exhibitions. Los Maestros: Early Explorers of Chicano Identity highlights the contributions of active Chicano artists since the start of San Antonio’s Chicano arts movement in the 1960s and 1970s. The exhibitions will be on view through June 28, 2020.
On the second floor of Centro de Artes, Los Maestros: Early Explorers of Chicano Identity focuses on three of the underrepresented artists central to the early Chicano arts movement in San Antonio – Jesse Almazán, José Esquivel, and Rudy Treviño. All three artists were members of Con Safo, San Antonio’s first Chicano arts collective. This exhibition focuses on their unique contributions and histories as individual artists. This exhibition also marks the first public showing of Jesse Almazán’s work since his death in 2002. Jesse’s wife, Maggie Almazán, has loaned her collection and archives for the exhibition.
Out of the Chicano civil rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s, a cohort of talented Mexican-American artists emerged in San Antonio, Texas. Excluded from mainstream galleries and museums, these artists began to organize their own groups, exhibitions, and galleries, interweaving their shared artistic aspirations with commentaries on the social movements of the time. Many were employed as commercial artists, graphic designers, and sign painters. However, their passion was for fine art. Together, they opened new doors for one another and for future generations, and entered into an uncharted exploration of Chicano art, politics, and identity.
Centro Cultural Aztlan is the curator of the Los Maestros exhibition. The organization’s Executive Director, Malena Gonzalez-Cid, began developing plans for the exhibition in 2018 through a series of interviews with the featured artists.
Centro de Artes Gallery is an institution dedicated to telling the story of the Latino experience in the United States, with a focus on San Antonio and South Texas through local and regional art, history and culture, and dedicated to sharing the transnational experience of Latinos in the United States. In 2018, the City of San Antonio Department of Arts & Culture hosted an open call for exhibitions for Centro de Artes as part of the strategic plan developed for the gallery in collaboration with the community in 2017. XicanX: New Visions and Los Maestros: Early Explorers of Chicano Identity were two of the ten exhibitions selected by the Centro de Artes Committee through the inaugural open call.
For more information about the exhibits, visit www.sanantonio.gov/CentrodeArtes.
The cover art featured this week is called:
Lettuce Field w/ Target & Skull, 1975
By Rudy Treviño
Medium: Acrylic on canvas
