‘Faux Bois’ Roots Run Deep in San Antonio

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Like remnants of an ancient petrified forest blending in with the urban landscape, San Antonio’s cement artworks, faux bois or trabajo rustico, are cherished landmarks.  The rough “bark” of the old trolley stop near Central Market in Alamo Heights; the covered bridge in Brackenridge Park; and the entrance to the Japanese Tea Garden has been rubbed to a sheen by the exploring hands of generations of San Antonio’s children.

The craft of creating trabajo rustico sculptures could have been lost for San Antonio following the deaths of Dionicio Rodriguez and Maximo Cortes, but fortunately Maximo’s son, Carlos Cortes, inherited both the secret formulas and the talent to continue to add prominent public artwork throughout the city.  Carlos installed a graceful “cypress” bursting through the ceiling in the middle of the San Antonio Children’s Museum; built the Treehouse for the Witte Museum; added a trellis to the River Walk; recently completed the massive Grotto for the river’s Museum Reach; and installed benches in a pocket park.

Carlos Cortes’ cypress tree seems to grow through the ceiling of the San Antonio Children’s Museum.
Private donations garnered by the San Antonio River Foundation funded Carlos Cortes’ fanciful grotto along the Museum Reach of the San Antonio River Walk.
Carlos Cortes

San Antonio’s connections to the art form of trabajo rustico are explored during an exhibit and related symposium, both part of the celebration of Historic Preservation Month.  The Tradition of Trabajo Rustico:  Fantasies in Cement can be viewed in the Russell Hill Rogers Lecture Hall in the Navarro Campus of the Southwest School of Art and Craft through May 30.

Speakers at the symposium on the morning of Saturday, May 15, include Patsy Pittman Light, author of Capturing Nature:  The Cement Sculpture of Dionicio Rodriguez.  Following a box lunch, there will be a bus tour of some of San Antonio’s faux bois landmarks and a demonstration by Cortes at his studio.

The morning session is admission-free.  The fee for lunch and the afternoon bus tour is $25.  For more information, telephone the San Antonio Conservation Society, 210-224-6163.

January 16, 2013, Update: San Antonio’s faux bois art and artists are featured on KLRN ARTS.

Meetings: The Opposite of Brainstorming

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After just reading the agenda for an upcoming meeting, I came across this post relative to the brainfreeze pain, then numbness, we often experience during long, draining, sometimes contentious, artificial interactions.

Writer Seth Godin reflects on meetings:

Where do you find good ideas?

Do you often find ideas that change everything in a windowless conference room, with bottled water on the side table and a circle of critics and skeptics wearing suits looking at you as the clock ticks down to the 60 minutes allocated for this meeting?

If not, then why do you keep looking for them there?

The best ideas come out of the corner of our eye, the edge of our consciousness, in a flash.  They are the result of misdirection and random collisions, not a grinding corporate onslaught.  And yet we waste billions of dollars in time looking for them where they’re not….

Uninvite the devil’s advocate, since the devil doesn’t need one, he’s doing fine.

Let the Alamo Guardians Retaliate

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No official comments from the Daughters of the Republic of Texas have been submitted to any of the posts about The Alamo on this blog; so it seems only fair to share their official stance on diverse topics with readers.  Sort of an equal-time kind of thing. 

This way to give the custodians of The Alamo their opportunity to vent about attacks against them in the media is courtesy of The Alamo Wake-Up Call Channel on YouTube.

May 13 Update:  “Another Battle Brews at The Alamo”

June 18 Update:  “DRT Now Under State Investigation”; Attorney General Gregg Abbott’s Request to Examine DRT; related editorial; and Alamo without Director

June 23 Update:  Reports on the saga continue:  “Hopefully, we will be successful in narrowing the scope and extending the time window, as DRT is in the middle of gathering information for our upcoming audit,” Atkins wrote.

July 1 Update:  Editorial pointing out the Alamo’s cracked roof as symbolic of the DRT’s problems.

Update on October 19:  John Branch editorial cartoon: