By Sylvia Hernandez
Last month, Rosalinda Gonzalez, a Converse resident, found herself at the Texas A&M-San Antonio Main Campus Building, looking at nearly six dozen pieces by renowned artist Pablo Picasso.
It wasn’t what Gonzalez, 36, expected to find at the University, where she’d gone with a friend who needed to stop by the campus.
“I had no idea the school was so far out there. I thought this was going to be a quick drive,” Gonzalez said. “But we drove and drove and drove until all of a sudden, we were in the middle of nowhere.”
Gonzalez stumbled upon the pieces by chance. But the University’s Picasso exhibit is drawing people to Main Campus in the deep South Side for the first time, bringing visitors not only from different parts of the city, but also from different parts of the state.
Sylvia Sutton, a retired school principal from the San Antonio Independent School District, co-chaired the Picasso exhibit steering committee with Texas A&M graduate Henry Ortega, Jr. alongside University President Maria Hernandez Ferrier.
Sutton said the committee met every other week to plan and research the exhibit.
She traveled to Spain with Ferrier and Marilu Reyna, associate vice president of university communications, to select the pieces and worked to get authorization through the cultural ministry of Spain to negotiate the duration of the exhibit.
“We’ve heard wonderful things about the exhibit,” said Miki Jocelyn Rubio, university special events coordinator. “A lot of the comments we’re getting are mostly geared towards the excitement of something unique coming to the University and to the South Side.”
Since the opening of the “Picasso, Amigos y Contemporáneos” exhibit on March 17, many school groups have come to Main Campus to tour the exhibit, Sutton said, including all the school districts in Bexar County and schools in cities as far away as La Joya and Hidalgo in South Texas.
Rubio added that more than 5,000 other individual visitors have also viewed the collection.
“We have had over 200 school tours scheduled to date,” Rubio said, “bringing hundreds of school children on campus to view the collection and to expose them to the University in the hopes that they will be future Jaguars.”
Most guests have never been to this campus and they are in awe of its beauty, Rubio said.
One of the schools that toured the Picasso exhibit was the Pegasus School of Liberal Arts and Sciences, an open enrollment public charter school in downtown Dallas.
“The group of 21 high school juniors made the two-day trip to San Antonio on March 27 for the opportunity to enjoy the exhibit but also to visit colleges and universities in the area,” assistant Superintendent Frances Teran said. “They liked what they saw at A&M.”
The students have studied Picasso in class and were excited to see some of his actual work and, because they had some background information on this artist, they had a lot of good questions to ask, she said.
Teran went back to Dallas elated and has been promoting the exhibit to friends and other educators. Visitors are not allowed to photograph the exhibit, but the students were able to take a group picture in front of the Picasso banner on the first floor of Main Campus.
Gonzalez did not share the same opinion about the exhibit.
“I know absolutely nothing about art but I do recognize the Picasso name,” Gonzalez said. “I went up to see the exhibit just to kill time while I was waiting on my friend.”
After looking at paintings and some of the pieces in the collection, Gonzalez said she wasn’t impressed and didn’t understand what the big deal was about Picasso or why his work is so famous.
“They look like simple pictures with very plain frames. But Picasso sure did seem to like horses and bulls,” Gonzalez said.
She did admit that because she has no knowledge or experience with analyzing art that she shouldn’t be so quick to downplay the importance of Picasso’s work.
“The fact is, and a lot of people would disagree,” Sutton said, “he is one of the most significant artists of the 20th century.”
Sutton, who is one of the volunteer docents for the exhibit said she has strategies for educating the public on Picasso and described the collection as a world class exhibit.
The docents are all volunteers, many of whom are from the San Antonio Museum of Art, as well as the McNay Art Museum and The Witte Museum. They’re there because the main focus is the students and the community she added.
“My sole focus is to make it good for students,” Sutton said. “ I try to make it really basic like a story — the life of a man and how it affects his works of art.”
Sutton talks about Picasso as a child prodigy and the role his father had in educating and shows how the artists themselves were educated. She also explains who his teachers were and what they taught him.
The University website offers specific details about the art works that comprise the “Picasso, Amigos y Contemporáneos” collection. Of the 97 pieces in the exhibit, 70 are Picasso’s and the remaining 27 are works by teachers, friends and contemporaries.
Once the exhibit closes, it is scheduled to be returned to Spain, but there are requests to the exhibit owner from other regions of the United States to bring it to their area Sutton said.
“People are driving a long way to come to see it and have loved it entirely,” Sutton said.
An officer at the exhibit relayed a story to Sutton of a ranch hand from South Texas who toured the collection. Showing his calloused hands to the officer, the visitor said: “Look at me. I have worked on ranches all my life. I have read about Picasso and I have always wanted to see his work.” He cried, saying “I never thought in my lifetime that I would see a work by Picasso.”
Rubio said that the viewing times for the public have picked up traffic and that the weekend times have also increased in popularity. She added that a number of VIA Metropolitan Transit buses are providing the Picasso exhibit with citywide advertising.
“The University did not pay for the Picasso advertisements on the VIA buses,” Rubio said. “This was a generous donation from Clear Channel Outdoor and VIA Metropolitan Transit.”
The Picasso exhibit is also drawing national attention and bringing political dignitaries to Main Campus.
Speaker of the House John Boehner and his staff have visited the campus with Texas Governor Rick Perry scheduled to come on May 15.
According to the University website, reservations can no longer be made for school group tours as all available slots have been booked. The exhibit is open for scheduled guided tours from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Monday through Friday and 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. for the general public.
The weekend schedule to view the collection is from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday and 12 p.m.– 4 p.m. Sunday.
“The Picasso exhibit gave us an amazing opportunity to bring great works of art to our University and we wanted to make sure it was free and open to the public,” President Ferrier said. “Because it also included a historic display of Bernardode Galvez, it gave us the opportunity to really show our folks on the South Side of town the important role our ancestors played in the American Revolution.”
With only two weeks remaining before the “Picasso, Amigos y Contemporáneos” exhibit at Main Campus comes to an end, the community has until May 20 to take advantage of this free event.
“Our mission is to uplift the entire community,” Ferrier said, “and to let them know that this University belongs to them.”
