San Antonio’s downtown visual art landscape will receive a significant boost in 2024, thanks to a $250,000 grant from Bexar County to Centro San Antonio approved in late December.
Since April 2020, Centro’s Art Everywhere project has sponsored more than 140 murals, events and pop-up markets and shops in the downtown area, largely focused around Houston Street and adjoining streets.
Some projects are temporary, such as Peacock Alley one-day markets and art exhibitions and the August 2020 Elevated Melanin Tribute street painting around Travis Park, while others are intended to be permanent, including the 2021 large-scale The Last Parade mural by Rudy Herrera on the Kress building and the new Spurs-themed Por Vida mural on Navarro Street by Andy Benavides.
The Art Everywhere project helped enliven deserted downtown streets during the height of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 and 2021 and has buoyed businesses and street life since, according to Andi Rodriguez, Centro’s vice president of cultural placemaking.
“We exist to create vibrancy downtown and to support our local businesses,” Rodriguez said. Art, she said, can help “build bridges” between the business and cultural communities.
Trish DeBerry, recently a member of the Bexar County Commissioner’s Court and the successor of former Centro President Matt Brown, said Centro will have no trouble finding projects for the new round of Bexar County funding.
DeBerry said she understands the work Rodriguez did early on to get buy-in from the business community to support art. “Now we’ve gotten over that hurdle and we can barely keep up with requests regarding installations,” she said.
Those requests, including a potential mural on a side wall of the VFW Post 76 on 10th Street, are still in the works. Given the success of the Art Everywhere program, DeBerry said, Centro is now looking beyond the strict limits of downtown, including a possible mural celebrating the 50th anniversary of Methodist Hospital Metropolitan.
In 2021, the Conservation Society of San Antonio publicly expressed concern to city leadership over the expanding Art Everywhere program, insisting architecture defines San Antonio rather than its contemporary art.
But in an email to the San Antonio Report, Conservation Society President Kathy Krnavek, who took over the leadership position in 2022, expressed qualified support for Centro’s upcoming round of downtown art activations.
“The Conservation Society of San Antonio appreciates public art that complements and enlivens various parts of our city. We … are grateful for locations where the blank walls of parking structures and similar locations are enlivened by homegrown murals,” Krnavek said.
However, her statement concludes with an echo of previous Conservation Society concerns requesting “long-range planning” for new mural installations. “We have requested and still request a plan for public art in the downtown area to [make sure] that our treasured landmark areas are preserved.”
DeBerry said Centro is in the process of updating a 2009 strategic framework plan that will take a holistic view of downtown, considering the housing market, what DeBerry called “connectivity and corridors,” economic development and partnerships including the Art Everywhere program’s installations and activations.
Centro will be “more proactive relative to our outreach, especially when it comes to the stories that we need to tell,” DeBerry said. “Certainly, one of them is Art Everywhere and collaborating with partners and bringing them along with us.”
Conservation, art, architecture and preservation should all be part of the conversation, she said.
“We absolutely need to sit down with the Conservation Society, we need to update them on where we’re at, not just with murals,” DeBerry said, but all aspects of the Art Everywhere project. “Let’s work out a plan together, perhaps in conjunction with the city. And let’s figure this out.”
