| Exhibition Review | The Journal of American History, 95.1

Exhibition Reviews

Benjamin Filene and Brian Horrigan
Contributing Editors

Introduction

The "Exhibition Reviews" section in this issue of the Journal of American History examines a wide spectrum of exhibitions—a new museum of Hispanic art and culture, an exhibition of architectural drawings, a small tribal museum, a traveling exhibition organized by a science museum, a controversial exhibition that has traveled internationally (and appeared in a James Bond movie), and an amateur photography show at an art museum. We are committed to surveying a broad range of representations of history in the public sphere: living history projects; historical pageants and reenactments; memorials; historic preservation projects; educational programming; and virtual museums, as well as projects—such as "Race" and "Body Worlds," reviewed here—that cut across academic disciplines. We also welcome comparative reviews and critical essays on the theory and practice of history exhibitions. In making selections for inclusion, we seek to represent a variety of types and sizes of exhibitions and originating institutions, as well as a geographical and topical range. We are also interested in providing Journal readers with a sense of the visitor experience of exhibitions, seeing exhibitions as interpretive products for diverse public audiences. We welcome comments on the reviews published here, as well as suggestions for upcoming issues. Please contact:

Benjamin Filene	Brian Horrigan
Department of History	Minnesota Historical Society
University of North Carolina	345 W. Kellogg Blvd.
P.O. Box 26170	St. Paul, MN 55102
Greensboro, NC 27402	brian.horrigan@mnhs.org
bpfilene@uncg.edu

Museo Alameda. San Antonio, Tex. http://www.thealameda.org/.
Permanent and temporary exhibitions, opened April 2007. 20,000 sq. ft. Carol Wyrick, director; Eliseo Rios, director of administration.

In his poetic memoir Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation (1999), John Philip Santos characterized San Antonio, Texas, as "a palimpsest of erasures a place where the modern tourist landscape only faintly reveals the city's multicultural past," (p. 149). Indeed, the urban topography of San Antonio, with its patchwork of corporate hotels, Spanish missions, and asphalt parking lots, offers a historic landscape riddled with blank spaces. The creators of the Museo Alameda wish to fill those blank spaces both literally and figuratively by adding two new institutions to San Antonio's civic landscape and by showcasing Latino experiences in the United States. Although the Alameda Theater is not yet fully restored and open to the public, its sister institution, the Museo Alameda, opened in April 2007 and brings to the city a new venue for the exploration of "Latino experience in America through art, history, and culture" ("Mission Statement," http://www.thealameda.org/). With twenty thousand square feet, it provides an expansive space to exhibit that experience "through multiple art forms intended to foster contemplation, deliberation, and understanding of America's cultural fabric" ("A Celebration of the Smithsonian in San Antonio," ibid.). The museo's exhibitions use the power of life stories, coupled with visual arts and material culture, to enrich our understanding of Latino culture, broadly defined. (The museo uses "Latino" as an umbrella term that includes Mexican American people and experience.) However, the focus on art and contemporary stories may leave historians craving a stronger depiction of historical roots and a greater effort to weave the stories into larger social and cultural narratives that could help inform our understanding of American history.

As many reviewers have noted, San Antonio is the right place for this ambitious institution. The New York Times cited the large percentage of Hispanic citizens and the city's close proximity to the Mexican border as motives for locating the museum in that city (Edward Rothstein, "Celebrating Hispanics from Both Sides of a Hyphenated Identity," New York Times, April 21, 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/21/arts/design/21smit.html?fta=y). But San Antonio has deeper historical connections to diverse Latino heritage; the city has been, since its founding by the Spanish in the early eighteenth century, a cultural borderland defined by its historical relationship to Spain and Mexico. For more than two centuries San Antonio has been a crossroads for natives, migrants, immigrants, and tourists. Yet, despite the diversity of its population, economic and racial segregation have divided the city into four distinct quadrants since the early twentieth century. The remnants of the segregated landscape still exist, even as the population has topped 1 million.

The founders of the museo chose a critical location for the institution, one that bridges those historical divisions while emphasizing Latino contributions to myth, memory, identity, and commerce in the city. The museo occupies a corner of the city's historic market square, known as El Mercado, at the edge of the long-established Mexican neighborhood yet within the tourist geography of downtown. Locals and tourists flock to El Mercado to browse Mexican imports, eat at the venerable Mi Tierra restaurant, and pay tribute to Tejano music at weekend performances in the central square. This setting demonstrates the power of place both to highlight Mexican and Latino culture and to reach a wide audience. The museum building communicates well with the surrounding landscape through its bright color palette, a gift shop that opens onto the market, and a pierced metal facade that references luminarias and lights up after dark.

In choosing to occupy this shared civic space, the museum has distinguished itself from older institutions that simultaneously enshrined Anglo expansionism and promoted a Spanish colonial fantasy. In the early twentieth century, San Antonians built a cultural infrastructure of museums, historic sites, and cultural centers that mirrored similar efforts across the Southwest. Some sites, such as the Alamo, became influential promoters of Anglo history while others, such as the Witte Memorial Museum and the Institute of Texan Cultures, embodied the deep ambiguities prevalent in the borderlands city. Almost all have straddled the lines between history and heritage. Some older institutions have begun to revise their historical interpretations and to acknowledge the contributions of Mexicans and Tejanos to the city's history; newer museums and cultural centers (the San Antonio Art Museum, Casa Navarro State Historic Site, and the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center) have marked a more recent wave of celebration and commemoration of Mexican and Tejano art, history, and culture. In this cultural landscape, the museo has the potential to offer a fresh interpretation, one that places Latinos at the center of the story and situates San Antonio on a larger, transnational map of cultural exchange.

The pierced metal facade of the Museo Alameda's entrance echoes the papel picado (cut paper) banners strung in nearby El Mercado, San Antonio's market square, and it references the luminarias (pierced paper lanterns) used in local celebrations. The facade ties the museum to the civic space of the San Antonio, Texas, marketplace and dazzles nighttime spectators with a light show. Photo by Kathleen Franz. Courtesy Kathleen Franz.

The Museo Alameda grew out of more than two decades of advocacy for the inclusion of Latino history and culture in local and national museums. In San Antonio the efforts to include Mexican and Tejano history in museums can be traced from the Chicano movement of the 1960s and 1970s through the "second battle of the Alamo" during the state's sesquicentennial in 1986 to the creation of Latino cultural arts centers in the 1980s and 1990s (among them the Centro Alameda, the progenitor of the Museo Alameda). In 1995, the City of San Antonio, at the prompting of the Mexican American business leaders who had formed the Centro Alameda, purchased the Alameda Theater for the creation of a national center for Latino arts and culture. In 1994 a national task force on Latino initiatives delivered its influential report, Willful Neglect, which criticized the Smithsonian Institution for its exclusion of Latino subjects and administrators. Efforts in San Antonio and Washington, D.C., merged when the Smithsonian granted the Alameda project one of its first affiliate agreements in 1997, highlighting the Smithsonian's new commitment to supporting Latino arts, culture, and history and allowing the future museo to borrow Smithsonian objects and host traveling shows.

Although the museum has used its connection to the Smithsonian to attract attention and lend authority to its work, some of its most popular shows have drawn on local resources. Rather than opting for budget-breaking multimedia installations, as some new institutions have done, the museum has made a commitment to using life stories coupled with art and artifacts to promote its explorations of identity.

Walkthrough

In December 2007 the museum featured three art installations and three full-scale exhibitions, all of which highlighted the cultural production and expression of Latino identity. Although interdisciplinary, the installations and exhibitions draw heavily on art and decorative arts. The artist Franco Mondini-Ruiz created two of the installations. The more historical of the two, "Casa Mireles Botanica Infinito," features artifacts from a family-owned herb and religious artifacts shop once located near the museum. This assemblage memorializes the store's legendary owner, Señora Berta Mireles. The room-sized piece surrounds the viewer with objects and acts as a metonym for a larger category of neighborhood institutions. A short label on "memory and the American story" identifies Mireles as an important businesswoman and a member of the Mexican Chamber of Commerce. Yet the piece reveals little else about her life or role in the community. For those of us who want to learn more about the cultural history of botanicas, the label suggests enticingly that "real life social transactions like choosing, buying, and selling become performance in a space where art and life interact simultaneously." But how? I spent quite a while pondering the installation trying to imagine Mireles running her store, dispensing herbs and advice. I wanted to place her work more broadly in a city that, for over a century, has mixed faith, family, commerce, and touristic spectacle. I wished the artist had said more about the historical importance of her life and her work.

The final installation, a small exhibit about the Alameda Theater, also uses art to speak for history. (The theater complex itself is located a few blocks from the museum.) Built by the Italian American G. A. "Tano" Lucchese in 1949, the theater is a stunning example of late Mexican art deco moderne, with interior fluorescent murals depicting the confluence of Mexican and American history. In the 1950s the theater became a showplace for Spanish-language film and vaudeville, and its adjacent office building housed the offices of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund and kcor, the first full-time Spanish-language radio station in the United States operated by a Mexican American. The small installation in the museum features photographs, a video of film shorts, and two enormous architectural figures from the theater's interior. The main text panel explains that the "Alameda theater is a cultural beacon where the cultural imagination of generations of Mexican American audiences were nourished and sustained." That statement is just a teaser for those who will see the potential to interpret borderlands popular culture through the theater. As it stands, this grouping of images and artifacts provides an intriguing collection isolated from a larger historical context.

The Alameda Theater, because of its central place in the museum's history and the history of the Mexican American community, deserves a more extensive exhibition and will probably receive one in 2011 when the restored theater opens to the public. Although the museum's staff members have not defined the future exhibit, they are aware of its potential to relate a rich set of memories. To this end, they have created space on the museum's Web site to collect the memories of residents who grew up watching films or stars of the Spanish-language variety stage in the darkened auditorium. Those memories will provide incomparable resources for a future exhibition. I hope the museum incorporates them into a history that speaks to the broader social and cultural changes at work in the postwar period among Mexican Americans.

The three temporary exhibitions at the museo at the time of my visit offered meatier explorations of Latino identities, but they still left me wanting more social context, deeper interrogations of change over time, and greater reflection on the ways cultures interact to produce identity. Nevertheless, the exhibitions did demonstrate the diversity of Latino subjects and allowed Latinos to determine their own representation within the museum. The roster of exhibitions included one Smithsonian-produced traveling show, "¡Azúcar! The Life and Music of Celia Cruz," and two exhibits produced in house, "Huipiles: A Celebration" and "San Anto: Pride of the Southside/En El Mero Hueso."

In the Celia Cruz exhibition, curators from the National Museum of American History offered a cultural biography of the singer, tracing her career from the 1950s to the end of her life in 2003. Through extensive use of visual resources, including an abundance of video and material culture, the exhibition explored the development of salsa and Cruz's adaptation of the musical form from her early years in Cuba to her exile in the United States. It also took Cruz's "battle cry" of "¡Azúcar!" as a central metaphor for her musical prowess: as the exhibition text explained, "Literally meaning sugar, it was her way of energizing and injecting that extra serving of sabor [denoting both flavor and mastery] into music to make it her own." The exhibition used Cruz's costumes and a re-creation of her dressing room to illustrate her incorporation of Cuban, African, and Latin influences. Cruz's costumes practically jumped out of the cases, dynamic embodiments of migration, music, and the creation of a cultural hybrid who thrived at the intersection of musical styles.

"Huipiles: A Celebration" also paid tribute to an influential woman, one who preserves cultural traditions to this day, the renowned collector Señora Maria Luísa Camacho de López. Organized around embroidered blouse- or dress-like garments known as huipiles, the exhibit used textiles to commemorate López's work, the artistry of Mesoamerican women weavers, and a new generation of Latinas who incorporate these textiles into the making of new identities. The show displayed huipiles alongside portraits of huipilistas, affluent Latinas, such as the author Sandra Cisneros, who wear the intricately decorated textiles as symbols of a complex mix of heritage, class, and politics. Cisneros wrote in the exhibition catalog:

Each time I wear a huipil, I am saying, "Look, I know I can afford Neiman Marcus, but I'd rather wear an indigenous designer from Mexico...." I wear this textile as a way for me to resist the mexiphobia going on under the guise of Homeland Security.... To say I am of Las Americas, both North and South. A bridge and not a wall against forgetting. This cloth is the flag of who I am.

Paintings and photographs of huipilistas by two local artists depicted Latinas combining textiles from different regions and integrating them into their wardrobes. The exhibition design integrated material culture, art, and storytelling to celebrate the huipiles, their adaptability and artistry, and the huipilistas' appropriation of them as a signifier of cultural affiliation and contemporary politics. The exhibit also exemplified what José E. Limón has called a new Latino museum culture, one that gives Latinos power over their own representation (José E. Limón, "Have We Arrived? Class, Museum Culture, and Mexican-America," Smithsonian Center for Latino Initiatives, http://latino.si.edu/researchandmuseums/presentations/jose_limon.htm).

"San Anto: Pride of the Southside/En El Mero Hueso" offered another kind of celebration, one that contained serious reflections on San Antonio's barrios. The exhibition investigated the relationship between two painters, Alex Rubio and Vincent Valdez, who met in 1987 when the elder Rubio selected ten-year-old Valdez to contribute to a mural project for a local peace and justice center. The exhibition charted their collaboration, their influence on each other's painting, and their connections to community and geography. Although the show provided a wealth of material for those interested in contemporary Latino art, the artists' explorations of place struck me as most relevant to historians. The title of the show, taking a statement from each artist on San Anto, the shortened city name used by Mexican Americans on the south and west sides, highlighted a bone-deep connection to place (en el mero hueso may be translated "deep within the bone"). Examining the mentor/student relationship between Rubio and Valdez, the curator charted their overlapping lives and careers on a wall-sized map of the city. The map, which dominated the center of the gallery, not only connected the two men to the geography of San Antonio, but allowed them to remap the city, replacing familiar tourist icons with symbols of their experience: housing projects, high schools, and the murals they created. The San Antonio skyline and familiar neighborhood fixtures became points of orientation and potent characters in their paintings. Personal artifacts also suggested the artists' place in family and community history. Ultimately, "San Anto" eloquently wrote a new set of Mexican American stories over San Antonio's palimpsest of erasures.

Rooted in shared experiences and familiar geography, the "San Anto" exhibit attracted a large local audience to the museo. One San Antonio reviewer wrote that the show's popularity stemmed from the artists' ability to tell "the truth of living in a locale divided by race, culture, and income" while communicating "a message that transcends cultural barriers" (Jennifer Herrera, "Southside/Westside Connection," San Antonio Current, Dec. 19–25, 2007, p. 24). In its unflinching, sometimes poignant, and striking vision of the city's barrios, "San Anto" garnered a diverse audience for the museum. One of the central goals of the institution, according to the museo's director, Carol Wyrick, has been to attract "nontraditional" museum-goers, or residents from the neighborhoods represented in this exhibition. During my two visits to the galleries, this show had more visitors than others at the museo. Even when other galleries were silent, "San Anto" was packed with an intergenerational and mixed crowd of Mexican American and Anglo visitors. Off site, the show was literally the talk of the town, with reviews in the alternative newspaper and chatter at downtown galleries and art bars. With its local focus and provocative vision, the exhibition provided a valuable model for a museum trying to broaden its subject matter and its audience, demonstrating that local topics have the power to illuminate Latino experiences in America and to generate conversation about those experiences in a local context.

As a native San Antonian, I found the Museo Alameda exciting and moving. The museum occupies an important location on shared territory in the larger terrain of the city. It has adopted an ambitious mission: not only to tell stories but also to consider Latinos' roles in weaving America's cultural fabric from a national and international perspective. I hope that the museum will take time to examine the process by which culture has been woven over time and the role of remembering in reweaving history. The museo's focus on life stories can fill in historical silences and create new kinds of historical narratives. Stories can provide valuable perspectives on identity, locality, family, and community; they can serve as the basis for artistic visions that make us see the world with new eyes. Yet as a historian, I also want to know how individual recollections constitute collective memory and how personal experiences fit into larger social and cultural histories. How did these individuals become historical actors who built communities, protested injustice, and collaborated with members of other groups in the production of shared history and shared territory? The Museo Alameda, like its theater namesake, sits at a critical juncture historically, geographically, and politically. It can begin to interpret the contested landscape and history of San Antonio, the state of Texas, and the United States from a Latino perspective and to address some of the "tough stuff" of history that surfaces at the urban crossroads of myth and memory.

Kathleen Franz

American University
Washington, D.C.

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Exhibition Reviews

Benjamin Filene and Brian HorriganContributing Editors

Introduction

Walkthrough

Benjamin Filene and Brian Horrigan
Contributing Editors