Tag: san antonio river foundation

Ribbons of Gaudi-inspired steel ripple above the river

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By the time I started this blog, most of the public art projects on the Museum Reach of the river seemed like old-hat. That is not to say the art is stale; I love it. I walked along there only this morning.

But I think the newest addition, a design inspired by balconies on a Gaudi apartment building in Barcelona, is by far the most stunning.

I already was a George Schroeder fan. Even though the stoplight is outrageously prolonged, I find myself driving south down New Braunfels, cutting across Funston and sitting at the intersection on Broadway to admire his entryway to Brackenridge Park. Its lines are so sensual and distracting, the poor car behind me generally is forced to honk.

I’ve become more of a Mission Reach kind of girl, but watching the installation of the railings on the Camden Street Bridge keeps drawing me back to that part of the river. That, and the fact there are no b-share stations south of Blue Star.

Steve Bennett of the Express-News wrote such a great story about the sculpture, I simply will defer to him:

“The whole design is based on the river,” says Schroeder…. Like a lot of Schroeder’s monumental public sculpture, such as “Passage” at the San Antonio Botanical Garden, “River Movement” was inspired partly by wanderlust.

“When I do these projects,” he says, “I try to make something that is drawn from my international travels. I try to bring something from that back to San Antonio.”

A longtime admirer of iconoclastic Spanish architect Antoni Gaudí‘s sinuous 1912 building Casa Milá, also known as La Pedrera (The Quarry) for its undulating limestone walls, Schroeder finally got a chance to see it in person during a trip to Barcelona…..

“The tangled-up metal (on the balustrades) looked very organic, an integral part of the building. So I kept that inspiration and drew on it for this project.”

My favorite part of Steve’s story is his assessment of the importance of this work:

What he’s done is create another San Antonio landmark that will endure for decades, a work that mimics, in an abstract way, the ripples on the water and the breeze blowing through the plants on the banks, even the wakes of the tourist-laden barges that cruise by regularly.

And, my other favorite part: I had not realized there was more to come. The San Antonio River Foundation also is funding more of Schroeder’s work at Newell. 

Thanks.

And while you are in the neighborhood, don’t forget to look upward for the Jesus Moroles stellae….

November 11, 2011, Update: So often when I walk this part of the river, it is barely light. But yesterday morning, I waited for it to warm up a bit. The bright morning sun reflected from the rippling river onto the underside of the bridge makes Schroeder’s design inspiration even more obvious.  

 

Susan Toomey Frost stimulates a second revival of San Antonio’s traditional tilework

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“Benign Obsession” was the moniker she assumed on eBay, but, fortunately for San Antonio, Susan Toomey Frost’s obsession with the products of San Jose Tile Workshops proved anything but benign.

I first “met” “Benign Obsession” online, back when eBay was more fun because you could see the id of those you were bidding against, begin to understand their patterns and learn from an expert willing to warn you of forgeries lurking out there. Susan, in fact, became the leading expert on San Jose Tile Workshops; she literally wrote the book about them. The stunningly beautiful publication, Colors on Clay, was published by Trinity Press in 2009.

I was excitedly telling Sally Buchanan, then president of the San Antonio River Foundation, that I finally succeeded in purchasing a San Jose plate on eBay when she casually mentioned her friend, Susan, was looking for a home for an entire tile mural. I was thrilled to be near one plate, but an entire mural…. With miles of extended riverside trails in the planning stage, surely we could find a home for a Work Projects Administration ((WPA) era mural.

And Susan said, yes, of course, she would donate it to the River Foundation. 

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Privately commissioned by Mayor Maury Maverick, the 188-tile mural had been rescued by Susan from a home on Huebner Road that was slated for demolition. She flew in a tile preservationist from California to gently pry the mural from concrete and carefully stored the tiles for close to a decade.

“What I do,” Susan explained to me the other day, “is try to save their lives and get them in public view in a safe place.”

Architects from Ford, Powell & Carson came up with the ideal location within the project, directly below El Tropicano Hotel on the river, the point where the original Robert H.H. Hugman designed River Walk began and the new Museum Reach now extends northward. This also is directly below the spot where the mural was born – the Mexican Arts and Crafts shop operated in the old Nat Lewis Barn by Ethel Wilson Harris (1893-1884).

In Colors on Clay, Susan wrote that Harris became the technical supervisor of the Arts and Crafts Division of WPA in San Antonio in 1939. Sixty workers joined her existing crew of craftsmen in the workshop on St. Mary’s Street.

While I had long admired the two existing murals on the river resulting from the WPA program – the “Twin Cypress” mural on the stairway by the flood control gate at the northern end of downtown river bend and “Old Mill Crossing” now at the river level of Hotel Contessa by the Navarro Street Bridge – I had no idea of the quantity and diversification of the products resulting from the WPA program until reading Colors on Clay. In addition to the four spectacular 60-square-foot works – depicting a century of sports in San Antonio from Native American archers on Military Plaza in 1840 to high school football in 1940 – at the entrance to Alamo Stadium, here are other contributions Susan described:

Six weeks after Harris’s appointment, WPA workers were building a kiln to fire 500 sets of dishes for distribution to needy families….

Harris also supervised the wrought iron shop that forged lanterns, railings, table frames and other decorative and useful objects, including window grilles for the Spanish Governor’s Palace, a fountain in the form of lilies of the valley for the San José Burial Park, a wrought iron gate and window frames for the San Pedro Park bandstand, barbecue pits for Olmos Park, and fifty artistic foot scrapers for schools and city parks….

Because federal funding supported the program, charitable and public institutions in and around San Antonio received the products free of charge. City parks and golf courses, for example, received tile drinking fountains and 1,000 concrete and wooden benches carved with a Lone Star….

Susan’s search-rescue-and-return efforts have taken her on virtual and actual adventures throughout the country as she finds new homes in San Antonio and nearby for the tiles made here long ago. Her obsession with the project is only matched by her generosity: Texas State Centennial tables now live at the Witte Museum and the Wittliff Collection at Texas State University; a “Las Sombras” mural graces the cafeteria at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church; and soon works will be installed on the river behind the Witte Museum, at the Ceramics Studio of the Southwest School of Art, at the new theater at SAY Si and at the restored Women’s Pavilion in HemisFair Park.

And there is another mural, this one recovered from Indiana, that Susan has pledged to the Mission Reach of the San Antonio River Improvements Project. It, too, is returning to just below its birthplace. During her lifetime, Ethel Wilson Harris operated San José Potteries next to Mission San José and Mission Crafts within the mission compound itself. The Mexican village scene will be installed at the portal reconnecting the historical ties of Mission San José to the river.

In 1943, the Texas Legislature recognized Ethel Wilson Harris for her role in “the revival and perpetuation of Mexican arts and crafts,” skills Spanish friars taught Native Americans long ago on mission grounds, skills almost lost as Americans rushed pell-mell into an age where machines mass-produced what once had been crafted carefully by hand.

This traditional art form from San Antonio’s past is now entering its second revival due to the efforts of Susan Toomey Frost. Her obsession is bringing the tiles home to roost before they were lost or all ended up hidden away from public view in the homes of wealthy Californians.

Stacy Levy: Interpreting the Connections of Nature and the Built Environment through Art

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Often people think that nature ends where the city begins. But natural processes are always occurring in the city. I like to explore the idea of nature in the city and make it visible to people.

Stacy Levy, from her website

For the 2009 Water and Land Festival in Niigata, Japan, Stacy Levy "planted" 600 18-foot-tall bamboo stems, "like tall grasses moving to the choreography of the wind."

As the Mission Reach of the San Antonio River Improvements Project continues to stretch southward toward Mission Espada, the fruit of the fundraising efforts of the San Antonio River Foundation emerges as public art enhancing the linear park skirting the river’s banks. The next phase opens to the public on Saturday, June 25, and will feature a “portal” strengthening the historical connection of Mission Concepcion to the river.

Although based in Pennsylvania, Stacy Levy is an environmental artist of international standing. Recent commissions include “Tide Poles” on the waterfront in Yonkers, New York; “River of Shade” in Harmon Library Park in Phoenix, Arizona; and “Tide Flowers” in Hudson River Park in New York. She taps talents gleaned from an unusually rich interdisciplinary background – studies at The Architectural Association in London; a B.A. in sculpture with a minor in forestry from Yale University; additional studies at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture; and a MFA in sculpture from the Tyler School of Art at Temple University – for her work.

Stacy shared a flowing description of her impression of the San Antonio River:

The San Antonio River flows through the city, its liquid presence flowing past the hardscape of the urban environment. This wonderful contrast of liquid nature and solid infrastructure is intriguing to me.  Sometimes water works slowly: sometimes languidly carving its path grain by grain, sometimes with the terrible scouring speed of a flood. But whatever the flow of the river, the water is always moving in a particular pattern of fluid dynamics. This pattern is beautiful but rarely perceivable to the eye. I wanted to capture this aspect of the flowing river and to show people another world of water: the pattern of fluid motion.

Her installation reflects not only the water and natural environment but also the built environment nearby, that of the more than 250-year-old Mission Nuestra Señora de la Purisima Concepción de Acuña. Stacy wrote:

…here, the water is evoked by sloping stone walls, so reminiscent of the architecture of the Mission Concepcion. This place of stone and water is where the mission and the river meet in an artful form, borrowing patterns and materials from each of these icons.  The stone seating walls curve and undulate like the major hydrological forces, creating a pattern of vortices made from stone which sweep the park user in. I tried to make this solid and dry environment feel like the swirling movement of river water.  And the walls undulate and slope like the Mission’s walls, are rough and cool to the touch in the shade of the trees planted in the terrace.

Portal at Mission Concepcion as envisioned by artist Stacy Levy

The gracefully curved walls and walkways will be completed in time for the June 25th celebration, but they are only the first phase of her contributions to the Mission Reach. While the final design for the next portion have yet to be approved, Stacy envisions art evocative of the fluid patterns of the river meshed with the original floral patterns found at Mission Concepcion.

More wonderful reasons to keep walking the river (refer to older posts such as this and this). 

Update on June 24, 2011: Preview of the opening of the next segment of the Mission Reach from the Express-News

Update on June 26, 2011: Express-News reports about Anne Wallace’s footbridge and more art to come….