Latina and Chicano Art Sightings at Witte Museum and McNay Art Museum. Part I: Witte. Texas Art: Kinship and Culture
The Witte’s collection of Texan Art:Kinship and Culture is extensive, beautiful, and impressive. For this year’s 2023 “Trailblazer,” event, Witte curators selected the works of several Tejanos, including Porfirio Salinas, Boyer Gonzalez, Jr., Xavier Gonzalez, Fidencio Duran, and Mission art craftsman Fernando Ramos. The works of Duran and Ramos were shown for the first time.
Fidencio Duran, “Winter Feast.” Gift of Harriett and Ricardo Romo. Photo by Ricardo Romo.
Fidencio Duran, one of the featured artists in the exhibit at the Witte Museum, is best known for his murals in Austin and South Texas. The opportunity to view some of his oil paintings recently collected by the Witte is a treat for San Antonians giving us an opportunity to become familiar with Latino artists outside the city.
Duran lives in Austin, but grew up in Lockhart, an old ranching community 30 miles south of Austin. Lockhart is particularly noted for its great Texas barbecue. For much of the 20th century, cattle ranches and agricultural farms surrounded the rural community. The pastoral characteristics of the region and the people living there are captured in Duran’s murals and paintings. Many of his subjects are inspired by the stories his father told him about immigrating from Mexico and living and working as a tenant farmer. Duran wrote in his Artist Statement that he seeks to “honor the history of his family and community in visual stories.”
Few Latino artists have captured the daily and ordinary routines of rural life as colorfully and accurately as Duran. The everyday activities of his family, tenant farmers in Lockhart and Maxwell, are masterfully painted in his art works. In 1990 my wife Harriett and I bought an oil painting “Winter Feast” that Duran completed in 1988. [We donated “Winter Feast” to the Witte Museum last year]. Duran shows how families came together to assist in the slaughter and processing of a hog. A mid-size hog could feed numerous families, and shredded pork often became the main ingredient for tamales.
Duran commented, “As tenant farmers, our family normally slaughtered a hog during the cold of winter. These events usually served as family gatherings with work for everyone. At the end of the day the proceeds were sampled and shared.” Duran’s painting shows nearly a dozen family members gathered in the family backyard, several active in the process of preparing a hog for cooking in a large tub.
Perhaps the most unusual artistic work on display in the Witte exhibit is that of Porfirio Salinas. His work is a large landscape painting of bluebonnets and cacti in the South Texas county meadow. In 1968, San Antonio businessman Dan Rheiner commissioned Salinas to paint a mural for his home office. The mural depicts Rheiner’s Las Pintas Ranch in Webb County south of San Antonio. When the house was sold, Witte art curators removed the mural painting by peeling the thick canvas off the walls. For the Witte Kinship and Culture exhibit, the curators reconstructed an exact home office-like replica to present Salinas’ Texas landscape work.
Born in Bastrop, Texas in 1910, Salinas moved to San Antonio as a child. He grew up in an era when Texas did poorly in educating Hispanics. Although Salinas’ education may have been limited to elementary school, he enjoyed drawing and painting from a young age. At age ten, he sold his first paintings to one of his teachers.
At age fifteen, while Salinas was employed at an art supply store near the San Antonio Riverwalk, he met the English-born painter, Robert W. Wood. Wood had a studio in the downtown area and hired Salinas to stretch canvases and frame paintings. Wood was taking art classes from famed Spanish-born artist José Arpa, famous for his Texas landscapes and likely introduced Salinas to him and other artists with similar interests. Salinas worked as an apprentice to Wood and Arpa and accompanied the two artists as they painted plein-air ( the open air) in the Texas hill country.
In a 1964 article titled “L.B.J. 's Favorite Painter” a New York Times reporter wrote that a “Salinas canvas is a chunk of Texas instantly recognized by anyone who has plodded across the sparse countryside of yucca and huisache.” The report added that “for 30 years [Salinas’s] work has been marked by faithful color, elaborate detail, and a keen eye for the vastness of the Texas plains.”
So much talent in our Latino community. Love to read this stories..