Artist Rolando Briseño is many things. Born and raised in San Antonio, he studied art at Cooper Union and Columbia University in New York, while also pursuing courses in art history and maintaining deep interests in anthropology and science.
He later lived in Madrid and Italy and traveled widely before settling back in his hometown in the mid-1990s with his husband Angel Rodriguez-Diaz, also a noted San Antonio artist. Asked about his ethnic heritage, Briseño answers with a gamut of ancestral homelands: Turkish, German, Scottish, Jewish, Arab, Native American from South America, Mexico and Texas.
All of these ingredients find their way into Briseño’s paintings, drawings, prints and sculptures, coalescing like a shared meal at the family dinner table, with relatives and friends gathered over home-cooked dishes providing flavor and nourishment.
Food and family are at the heart of Briseño’s artmaking, represented in Dining with Rolando Briseño: A 50-Year Retrospective at Centro de Artes.
But like the family meals he described during a recent walkthrough of the exhibition, breakfast, lunch and dinner can come with healthy doses of politics, religion and lively arguments.
“At the table, it was a lot of people,” Briseño said of his extended family. He said that early on he chose the table as a subject “because it’s a locus of community, a place where people can gather and talk.” The general rule is to avoid religion or politics, “but we talked about everything.”
Food as subject
A main theme running throughout Briseño’s five decades of artwork is recognition of the sophistication of his ancestral Mesoamerican cultures.
A 2010 book, Moctezuma’s Table: Rolando Briseño’s Mexican and Chicano Tablescapes collects many of Briseño’s food-themed artworks along with writings by various authors. The Centro de Artes exhibition begins with a roomful of these 1990s-era artworks, some of which include actual foodstuffs as mediums, from masa tortillas to red chile powder.
The term “tablescapes” describes the bird’s eye view angle of Briseño’s early paintings, loose depictions of hands reaching for various dishes painted on actual patterned tablecloths that lend visual complexity and realism to the images.
The cheekily titled Fatso Watso Table of 1995 is an energetic, detailed depiction of three regional cuisines termed “fattening” and partially responsible for overweight Americans by the artist, with fried elements and filled with saturated fats: beef brisket, chicken fried steak, German sausage, carne guisada and gorditas are among the dishes.
Briseño and several of his friends served as hand models for the painting, embodying a less critical, friendlier admission that, despite their unhealthy ingredients, these meals can also be “shared with pleasure and generosity,” as written on the wall label accompanying the painting.
The First Course of an Aztec Banquet of 1998 on the opposite wall attests to the graceful appeal to all senses of Mesoamerican cuisines. Such banquets would begin with the smelling of aromatic flowers and smoking of tobacco as offerings of peace and community, Briseño said.
Briseño’s friend and artist colleague Celia Álvarez-Muñoz also has an exhibition currently on display at Ruby City. In it are portraits of Briseño and Rodriguez-Diaz, whom she said were prominent in San Antonio in the late 1990s and 2000s, “very smart guys, both of them into the fabric of the action” not just in art, but in the highly politicized social issues of the time.
Bashing the Alamo
Briseño strikes a solemn tone with Corn Tortilla Twin Towers of 2002, intended as a memorial of the 9/11 attacks in his former home precinct of Manhattan. Made from stacks of fried corn tortillas, the piece draws attention to what the artist surmises as unknown victims of the tragedy, “los hijos de maiz” (the sons of corn), undocumented restaurant workers and janitors who perished along with the office workers but were never recognized or counted among the dead.
Briseño’s exhibition curator Ruben Cordova placed the Twin Towers sculpture at one end of the show’s central axis. At the other end is Briseño’s large-scale Spinning San Antonio de Valero a.k.a. Upside-Down San Antonio sculpture of 2009, which spins on its own axis so that either Saint Anthony or the Alamo — also known as the original Mission San Antonio de Valero — are upright.
On either side of the sculpture are two Alamo Piñatas, one with colors of the Mexican flag and the other with the blue, red and white star of the Texas flag.
The spinning sculpture and piñatas were employed in annual performances in front of the Alamo between 2009-2012, held on St. Anthony’s feast day of June 13. As an exhibition placard explains, one purpose of the performances was to upend the “spin” of the traditional Alamo narrative of heroism on the part of the Anglo settlers determined to take Texan territory from Mexico.
Quoting Briseño on the placard, the artist states that “The favor being requested in this case is that Mexican Americans/Tejanos take their rightful place as the heirs and descendants of the builders and the original inhabitants of this city.”
A piñata-bashing version of the performance was held in the gallery on Oct. 8, with tiny figurines depicting infants of color spilling out as a pointed critique of Stephen F. Austin calling native Tejanos a “mongrel” race, and Briseño’s belief that, “In many respects, our multi-ethnicity represents the future of the United States.”
Seeing the subatomic
As Cordova said plainly, “A big part of [Briseño’s] work is trying to get respect, or demanding respect for the Mexican American or the Chicano.”
And yet a deeper layer of Briseño’s work, not necessarily visible at first glance, is that essentially everyone is the same. The thought is no mere platitude for Briseño, whose interest in science has led him to adopt the structure of the proton as a symbol.
The proton is often depicted as a triangle of three red dots, a visual form Briseño adopts in many paintings including Mesa Cotidiana of 1992 which shows three tomatoes in the position of the proton.
When we look deeper into things, beyond skin tone and ethnicity and surface values, everything and everyone is made of the same fundamental material, Briseño said, and nothing is as stationary or stable as it might appear.
“Everything’s moving all the time, and everything’s made out of that,” he said of subatomic particles, which he also called “a copy of the universe” in seeing planets, stars and galaxies as larger versions of atoms.
‘Ancestral nutrition’
And Briseño himself could be said to be moving all the time, having lived in several cities and continuing his restless work as an artist throughout his lifetime.
Fellow artist Amalia Mesa-Bains also has a retrospective exhibition on display at the San Antonio Museum of Art at the same time as her longtime friend and colleague Briseño.
Mesa-Bains spoke not only of Latinx artists finally receiving overdue attention in museums but of the importance of retrospective exhibitions in gathering together a lifetime of artwork — a perspective beneficial to both the artist and exhibition visitors.
“It’s not only a life’s work,” she said. It allows you, as well as the viewers, to see the trajectory of your work, what the questions are that you’ve been pursuing, what are the material strategies that you’ve taken on. How does that story look over all those years?”
Mesa-Bains wrote early on about Briseño’s use of food as a subject focusing on the resilience of colonized and marginalized cultures holding on to “ancestral nutrition” in recipes and culinary traditions.
“He’s found many, many different ways to use the story of food and conviviality as a way to talk about the strength of a culture,” she said, “and then he has a great sense of humor, so [the artworks are] very, very fun.”
Dining with Rolando Briseño: A 50-Year Retrospective is on view at Centro de Artes through Feb. 9. The Department of Arts and Culture will host an Artist Talk with Rolando Briseño at the gallery on Thursday, Nov. 14 at 6 p.m. Admission is free.
