Star rising: the Blue Star Contemporary Art Center in San Antonio
By William Wisner
Ideally, a contemporary art space with a ".org" at the end of its web address ought to have broad public appeal, be responsive to its community, and lie a little off the beaten track. It should give a new twist of lime to the meaning of multicultural and walk the fine line between local and cosmopolitan, urbane and regional. If such a gallery could also mount exhibitions, activities, openings, and performances that appealed to both young and old, so much the better. Blue Star Contemporary Art Center manages (somehow) to do all of these things well, and it's managed to do them for almost 20 years -- a long time indeed for any art-related institution in any city. It is still a secret waiting to be uncovered for many Laredoans. Situated at 116 Blue Star, just inside the tracks, the Center is a long way from the River Walk, either by ideology or location, and that can be an education in itself. Also on the grounds is a first-class restaurant and pub plus another private art gallery featuring more traditional art. It all makes for a pleasing complex with plenty of parking. There's something gratifying and tipsy about the many openings here -- people spill out of the galleries, laughing and talking, into the warm Texas nights. Art becomes what it should be -- a mixture of observation and life as lived. It's worth pushing the speed limits for two hours to go up to Blue Star for an evening like this, and you can still be back in Laredo well before midnight.
Bill Fitzgibbons, the executive director of Blue Star, is disarmingly unsophisticated. He looks like he could talk the finer points of Parsells' defense as surely as he might talk about Poussin's paintings. In fact, he probably can. Somewhat portly, sporting a salt-and-pepper goatee, and with a signature rumple to his tweed coat, Fitgibbons trained as a public sculptor and has a distinctly public bias in the exhibitions he and his staff choose and assemble. His decision to reach out to young people was a particularly splendid and inspired one. There is nothing in Laredo resembling such an attitude, at least for the visual arts. No doubt Fitzgibbons manages to keep an eye on the bottom line. Fundraising at Blue Star, however, is balanced with shows of high quality and professionalism, curated by some of the best academic minds in the state. One senses, though he does not say it, that Fitzgibbons has had to drag some members of his board toward the view that only by getting Blue Star firmly in the public eye, and even off the premises and out into the city, can it remain a viable and stable entity.
Traditional museums or galleries have a somewhat easier task in defining themselves than contemporary ones, since they have a much wider temporal net to cast. Their collections may comprise many centuries, and they are not subject to the tyrannies of the moment that can beset the art world. How do you separate significant art from a mere trend? Part of the irony is you have to show it, and let people decide. Then there's the politics. Gender politics. Multicultural niceties. Jilted traditionalists. Blue Star's success proves that you cannot remain passive about such decisions. It's just that they are extraordinarily intuitive and subtle, and running an art center, for an executive director, turns out to be a work of art in itself. Without such chronically under-appreciated spaces, however, you can't really have that rare cultural dialogue we call a civilization.
The spaces at Blue Star are long, low, large and flexible. The variety of the Center's exhibitions requires such flexibility. The show just past, entitled "Tools as Art," was a humorous take on the idea of tools, and man, the tool-making animal. Everyday tools were altered -- sometimes subtly -- to celebrate their use, or render them useless, a comment on the idea of intentionality in what we do and how it can go awry. Of course, any altered object also makes us see reality more directly, perhaps allowing us to appreciate it more. Earlier in the past year, Blue Star held a fundraiser: "Blue Star Arts and Eats" -- a work of performance art if there ever was one, bringing artists and gourmet chefs together. I noted that the ticket prices were over 25 percent less than what they would have been in Laredo . Now showing, through February, is "Texas Uprising -- Indoor and Outdoor Sculpture," a theme dear to Fitgibbons' heart since he is a sculptor himself. He co-curated the exhibition with George Neubert, director of the San Antonio Museum of Art. March will feature the Nineteenth Annual Red Dot Art Sale and Benefit. It's basically an art sale, open to anyone, through April 2. One of the star shows of the year will open in April, and Fitgibbons is justly excited about it: "Mexican Report -- Routes of Diversity" (April/May). The exhibition will survey contemporary Mexican art of the past 20 years. An international show like this is a monster to mount, and speaks well of the professionalism and plain hard work of Blue Star's staff. Living on the border as we do, it is unimaginable that such a show will not be relevant to us in the most direct way. Lynn Herbert, of the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston, will curate the final show of the 2003-2004 season, "Blue Star 19," celebrating the Center's 19th anniversary (July).
Along the way this past year, Blue Star also hosted a number of other events, including, in December, the first international showing at an IMAX theater, of Mathew Barney's weirdly poignant set of art films, "The Cremaster Cycle," an epic cinematic work which has occasioned much debate in world art circles about its legitimacy and meaning. Once again, I was impressed with not only the diversity of the crowd, but at the number of young people in the audience, dressed in their (to me) strange attire and endearing urgency to be different. And they were serious about what they were seeing, too. The young woman behind me, in the fifth sequence of films, wept over the death of the lovers, revealing that she had been watching very closely and with her whole heart. The older I get, the more I am inclined to believe that such emotions among the young are not sentimentality, but the truth, which they understand all too well. Art helps to articulate these impenetrable emotions, which is why it so often speaks to the large issues with which youth wrestles.
A true city may be defined by many "moments." Umberto Eco, the Italian semiologist and author, once spoke of his hometown in Italy as an infinite number of "moments of departure," like Laredo . Other cities draw us inward, to actual intersections with others. San Antonio , I believe, may be poised to become a city of the future, especially since its highway system is in quite good order to support such a thing, which Seattle 's never was. San Antonio has heat, regional flavor, and a distinctive cuisine. Once you can get past the River Walk as the center of its existence, you might find yourself wandering through one of the most awesome arboretums in the world in the Broadway District, or the (still-low-priced) antique shops off Hildebrand. And its Children's Museum is outstanding. Finally, it's not gourmet, but you can get a solid Chinese meal at Hung Fong's near the Witte Museum for not much money at all. All these things are within easy reach. Of course the Blue Star Contemporary Art Center is, too. Call (210) 227-6960 for information. Or write them at Blue Star Contemporary Art Center , 116 Blue Star, San Antonio , TX , 78204 . Web Address: www.bluestarartspace.org. Regular gallery hours are Wednesday to Saturday, 12 p.m. to 6 p.m.
