Curating the West

Each Month We Ask Leading Museum Curators About What’s Going On In Their World.

Ralph Albert Blakelock (1847-1919), Indian Encampment, ca. 1881-1889, oil on canvas, 16 x 24”. Promised gift of the Jack and Valerie Guenther Foundation, L2022.5.Emily Wilson
Curator of Art
Briscoe Western Art Museum
San Antonio, TX
(210) 299-4499
www.briscoemuseum.org

What event (gallery show, museum exhibit, etc.) in the next few months are you looking forward to, and why?
The Briscoe will be opening our summer exhibition in late May that we are hosting and augmenting from the Tucson Museum of Art titled, Southwest Rising: Contemporary Art and the Legacy of Elaine Horwitch. It was organized by their head curator Julie Sasse, who is an authority on Southwestern modern and contemporary art. The show will feature a wide variety of artistic styles that are less traditional than what our audiences are used to seeing, so I’m excited to see the response from our patron base.

What are you reading?
I’ve been digging into scholarship on the Texas borderlands in preparation for an exhibition we are exploring on the topic. One of the advisors we are working with is William Kiser out of Texas A&M University-San Antonio. I’ve just begun his book Illusions of Empire: The Civil War and Reconstruction in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands. I’m learning more about the unregulated economic zones in the borderlands and a rogue Mexican governor’s role in helping the Confederacy ship out cotton through Texas ports—it’s fascinating.

Interesting exhibit, gallery opening or work of art you’ve seen recently.
I’ve made a recent visit to Gladys Rolan-de-Moras’ studio in San Antonio and viewed her work in progress. It was fun to see her studio setup and her plein air studies that she showed me. I love her fresh, impressionistic style. She also has a beautiful wardrobe of clothing that she uses as props for her artwork. Seeing all the intricate detail from handmade dresses and charro suits has been a treat.

What are you researching at the moment?
I’ve just finished writing the manuscript for our upcoming publication celebrating our 10th anniversary. This project had me researching 50 of the top works from our permanent collection, so I had been digging through archival files, historical newspapers and artist-focused articles on [digital library] JSTOR to complete my mini-essays. I had the most fun-find digging through old news stories from a Texas paper that mentioned Frederic Remington’s trip to Eagle Pass to visit a military detachment depicted in one of our watercolors.

What is your dream exhibit to curate? Or see someone else curate?
The museum recently received on loan as a promised gift a Ralph Blakelock painting titled, Indian Encampment. Reading deeper into tonalism, the artist’s technical style and his personal history have piqued my interest in organizing an exhibition on his Western works, tying together the artist’s interior life and the emphasis he places on mood and atmosphere in his oils. It would also let our education team explore art therapy and ties to mental health. —