The curatorial career of well-traveled Mia Lopez has come full circle.
A San Antonio native, she has been hired as the McNay Art Museum’s first curator of Latinx art, a position created thanks to a $650,000 grant from the Leadership in Art Museums Initiative.
The initiative is a philanthropic project of a consortium of national foundations, including the Alice L. Walton Foundation, Ford Foundation, Mellon Foundation and Pilot House Philanthropy, undertaken to improve diversity in museum administrations, collections and exhibitions.
Lopez will work to expand the presence of artists of Latino descent in the museum’s collections and programming.
When the museum received the grant in May, McNay Director Matthew McLendon said increasing diversity, equity and inclusion throughout the institution was a key element of the strategic plan he inherited upon his hiring in late 2022.
Announcing the Oct. 2 hire of Lopez, McLendon described the McNay as “San Antonio’s place of belonging” and said, “Mia, and this new role, will go a long way toward making this vision a tangible reality.”
Deep reverence
At age 38, Lopez brings a wealth of experience to her position. After earning a bachelor’s degree in art history from Rice University, she worked from 2007-2010 as an educator at the since-defunct Museo Alameda in San Antonio, then earned dual master’s degrees from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in modern and contemporary art history and arts administration.
Lopez has additionally participated in mentorship programs including the Smithsonian Institution Latino Museum Studies Program in 2012 and the National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures Leadership Institute in 2016.
The importance of seeing Latinx representation in museums was imprinted upon her when she recognized two familiar names among artworks on display during a visit to the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
Near a well-known Nam June Paik neon sculpture and a glittering Mickalene Thomas painting were pieces by San Antonio artists Mel Casas and Jesse Treviño.
“It brought tears to my eyes, I was so incredibly proud,” Lopez said, “not just being Latino, but being from San Antonio and to see two artists that I have such deep reverence for reflected in that way, to see our story rightfully centered within the American Art Museum of the Smithsonian.”
Back to the future
Lopez said her love of visual art began early, with regular family visits to the San Antonio Museum of Art, the McNay, and Friday art walks at the Blue Star Arts Complex.
“San Antonio has an amazing cultural landscape,” she said. “What makes San Antonio unique is the heart and soul of the art scene,” and the closeness of art and artists to their audiences imprinted upon her as she realized in college that she could turn her abiding interest into a career.
“I like being around artists and the alternative art scene,” Lopez said, which developed into a desire for hands-on work in developing exhibitions. “What I first dove into as I began to think about a career in art was working directly with artists.”
Her curatorial resume includes exhibitions at the DePaul Art Museum in Chicago and an upcoming show for the Museo Tamayo in Mexico City, and she has consulted on Latinx art for several institutions including Independent Curators International in New York, and the Weisman Art Museum in Minneapolis.
She now looks forward to working on community outreach and an acquisitions plan, while also “digging into the museum’s history … simultaneously looking backwards but also thinking about the future.”
Lopez is already helping with a large survey exhibition of artworks by the de la Torre brothers set to open in March.
Lopez said working to foster Latinx art connections at the McNay is “a dream come true. It was what I set out to do all those years ago when I left to get my graduate degree, because I knew that there was a lot of work I wanted to do here in this city. And it took me a little while to get the experience that I needed to. But now that I’m back, I’m just so excited to see what I can do.”
