Tag: Art events

PechaKucha San Antonio Returns to the Tobin Center

The final PechaKucha of 2025 will take place this Thursday November 6. Photo: PechaKucha San Antonio, used with permission.

PechaKucha San Antonio Closes Out 2025 with Volume 47 at the Tobin Center

SAN ANTONIO, TX — PechaKucha San Antonio, the global arts and culture series known for its fast-paced storytelling format, is excited to announce Volume 47 — the final event in its 2025 series. (PechaKucha San Antonio, 2025)

📅 Date: Thursday, November 6, 2025
📍 Location: Tobin Center for the Performing Arts, 100 Auditorium Circle, San Antonio, TX 78205
🕕 Schedule:

  • 6:30 p.m. — Welcome Reception
  • 7:30 p.m. — Presentations Begin

A Night of Creativity at the Tobin Center

Nestled along the banks of the San Antonio River, the historic Tobin Center is a downtown landmark that blends its original facade with a state-of-the-art performance space. This beautifully restored venue has become a beacon of creativity, fine art, and urban revitalization and it’s the perfect setting for PechaKucha’s final 2025 event.

Meet the Volume 47 Presenters

This edition of PechaKucha San Antonio will spotlight seven inspiring local voices, each sharing their passions through the signature 20×20 format — 20 images, 20 seconds each.

🎤 Featured Speakers:

  • Debby Andersen – Healer
  • Agosto Cuellar – Fashion Designer / Fashion Activist
  • Attie Jonker – Master Craftsman
  • Juliette Montoya – Salon Owner & Operator
  • Oscar Perez – Chief Everything Officer
  • Ed Saavedra – Visual Artist
  • Tori Santos – Community Choreographer

✨ The evening’s emcee will be Naomi Shihab Nye, San Antonio–based poet, educator, editor, and former Poet Laureate.

Music, Food, and Community

The welcome reception will feature live music by Kitten Mitten, a band of animal-loving friends turning their pets’ antics into anthems, blending heart and humor to amplify both furry and human voices that too often go unheard.

Guests will enjoy complimentary bites from local favorites including:
🍽 Liberty Bar • Tio Pelon’s Salsita • Cheesy Jane’s • Bakery Lorraine • Tobin Catering

The Tobin Center will also offer drinks and cocktails for purchase throughout the night.

Tickets

🎟 Tickets: $10 per person
🔗 Purchase here: Tobin Center

About PechaKucha

PechaKucha (pronounced PEH-chuh KOO-chuh) is a global arts and culture event where presenters share their passions through 20 images x 20 seconds — a total of 6 minutes and 40 seconds per talk.

The format was created by Klein Dytham Architecture in Tokyo in 2003 to encourage creative professionals to share ideas in a concise and engaging way. Since then, PechaKucha has grown to over 1,200 cities worldwide.

San Antonio hosted its first PechaKucha Night in February 2011 and now attracts hundreds of attendees each quarter, featuring architects, artists, makers, academics, community leaders, and more.

Photo: Ben Yanto, used with permission.

In the Shadows and Beyond: Contemporary at Blue Star’s Summer Exhibitions

En Las Sombras, Nuestros Fantasmas Acechan, Installation View, 2024. On view at Laguna, Mexico City, Mexico. Photo by Rubén Garay, used with permission.

Contemporary at Blue Star Announces Summer Exhibitions

Exploring the Body, Perception, and the Unseen Through Conceptual Art

San Antonio, TX – Contemporary at Blue Star is excited to present a compelling lineup of summer exhibitions that spotlight artists from Mexico and San Antonio. Through conceptual practices, these artists create work that transcends the physical, exploring how space, technology, memory, and sound influence the human body. (Contemporary at Blue Star, 2025)

🌑 En Las Sombras, Nuestros Fantasmas Acechan

(In the Shadows, Our Ghosts Lurk)
Curated by Fabiola Iza
On View: June 6 – October 5, 2025
Opening Reception: Friday, June 6 | 6–9 p.m.

Taco Talk with Curator Fabiola Iza
Friday, June 6 | 10:30a.m. – 11:30 a.m.
Kick off the exhibition with “Taco Talk,” a curator-led walkthrough paired with breakfast tacos and coffee. Learn about the works and themes with guest curator Fabiola Iza, and engage in an open conversation about the ideas behind the show.

Featuring Artists:

Alicia Ayanegui, Enrique Arriaga Celis, Daniela Bojórquez Vértiz, Virginia Colwell & Raquel Bañón Sodini, Manuela García, Leo Marz, Jonathan Miralda Fuksman, Daniel Monroy Cuevas, Paloma Rosenzweig, Oswaldo Ruiz

Inspired by the design of the panopticon, this exhibition examines the evolution of surveillance and the “omniscient gaze” in the age of modern technology. Originally exhibited at Laguna in Mexico City, the show has been reimagined for Contemporary at Blue Star by independent curator Fabiola Iza.

✨ Jason Willome

On View: July 11 – October 5, 2025
Opening Reception: Friday, July 11 | 6p.m. – 9p.m.

Fresh from his residency at Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin, Jason Willome debuts a new body of work that delves into the cosmos, consciousness, and personal mythology. Incorporating a wide range of media, this exhibition invites viewers to examine our relationship with the universe and the stories we tell ourselves.

🌊 Nadia Botello: Theophany

On View: July 11 – October 5, 2025
Opening Reception: Friday, July 11 | 6p.m. – 9p.m.

Sound artist Nadia Botello presents a site-specific installation from her Bodies of Water series. Listeners must physically engage with translucent tank sculptures to activate the audio compositions—sonic works created from field recordings of the San Antonio River and original choral arrangements. Botello’s work invites reflection on the body as both listener and vessel.

📸 Fabiola Menchelli

On View: July 11 – October 5, 2025
Opening Reception: Friday, July 11 | 6p.m. – 9p.m.

In complete darkness, without even the glow of a safelight, Fabiola Menchelli constructs photographs that unfold like sculptures. This immersive, darkened gallery experience mimics her creation process, allowing viewers to “discover” the artworks just as the artist did. Her work challenges and expands the limits of photography, light, and perception.

About Contemporary at Blue Star

Contemporary at Blue Star presents exhibitions by artists from San Antonio and around the world. Through a focus on global perspectives, we foster empathy, innovation, and action—fulfilling our mission to inspire, nurture, and innovate. As a non-collecting contemporary art space, we engage with current social and cultural issues through art.

🖼️ Admission is always free.
🔗 Read our full story

🕒 Visiting Hours

Monday–Tuesday: Closed
Wednesday: 12p.m. – 5p.m.
Thursday–Friday: 12p.m. – 8p.m.
Saturday–Sunday: 10a.m. – 6p.m.

📍 Contemporary at Blue Star
116 Blue Star, San Antonio, TX 78204
📞 (210) 227-6960

Unleash Your Creativity: Teen Night at Contemporary at Blue Star

Teen Night at Contemporary at Blue Star is this Friday March 21, 2025. Photo: Contemporary at Blue Star.

Join Contemporary at Blue Star for Teen Night on Friday March 21 from 6p.m. to 8p.m. Admission is free. Participants can view our exhibitions, enjoy artist-led art activities, perform at our open mic and mingle with other art-minded San Antonio teens. Teen Night is scheduled in conjunction with our exhibition, Mosh Now, Cry Later, reflecting on San Antonio’s love for sad rock music and its influence on visual culture and community building. Register for Teen Night here. (Contemporary at Blue Star, 2025)

Teen night activities:

  • One aspect of alternative and independent rock genres, which you can also find in the artworks of Mosh Now, Cry Later, is the use of DIY aesthetics.

For Teen Night we’ll be exploring various methods of art making that align with this tendency. Some of the staff lead activities include creating zines, buttons, and screen printing.

  • Open Mic! Express yourself through poetry, music, and more. The stage is yours, literally. Bring your friends to cheer you on or come solo and make new connections with fellow creative teens. 
  • Make a collage with Christie Blizard!

Led by Mosh Now, Cry Later exhibiting artist Christie Blizard, teens will take magazines, paper scraps, and other materials to create a unique artwork.

  • Blackout Poetry with Lilith Tijerina and Sarah Tijerina

In this activity, led by artists and performers Lilith Tijerina and Sarah Tijerina, teens will create a poem by taking found writing (from books, articles, etc.) and use a marker to blackout some of the words on a page. The words that remain will create a finished poem. 

This event is exclusively for teenagers. In an effort to maintain a safe and relaxing environment for San Antonio teenagers, school IDs will be needed to enter. There will be Contemporary staff chaperoning, as well as two security officers for the duration of the event. Visiting hours during this time will also be exclusively for Teens.

More about Mosh Now, Cry Later: San Antonio’s love of sad rock and its impact on visual culture. It is on view through June 8, 2025.

Featured Artists: Christie Blizard, Justo Cisneros, Joe De La Cruz, Juan Flores, Angela Fox, Brian Gonzalez, Nick Hay, Dom Jimenez, Ashley Mireles, Charlie Morris, Theresa Newsome, Ashley Perez, Kristy Perez, Anthony Rundblade

Mosh Now, Cry Later is an exploration of alternative and independent rock genres—from punk and post-punk to new wave, emo, screamo, hardcore punk, goth, and more—and their effect on San Antonio’s visual culture.

“The exhibition pinpoints the shared sensibilities of a cultural undercurrent within the visual art and music scenes of San Antonio and explores parallels in emotional undertones.” – Curator and Exhibitions Director Jacqueline Saragoza McGilvray

In this exhibition, fourteen San Antonio-connected artists work with an array of media to create artworks that echo these musical subgenres, either through their emotional undercurrents or aesthetic approaches.

Emerging from a rebellious response to mainstream music and practice, these subgenres embrace an ethos of DIY principles that challenge conventional methods of music-making. Similarly, the featured artists operate within counterculture, deviating from mainstream practices in subject or material.

This exhibition also examines how San Antonio’s Latinx youth are especially connected to these subcultures, drawing parallels between DIY aesthetics and rasquache, counterculture and machismo, and vocal techniques like screaming and the grito—a traditional emotional outcry in Mexican culture.

Central to this exhibition is the community archive and listening room or Mosh Pit, an interactive installation of photographs, ephemera, records, tapes, and more lining the walls. The Mosh Pit will highlight musicians from major and indie labels, local bands, and mixtapes and playlists contributed by the exhibiting artists. The inclusion of this installation serves to emphasize the dialogue and intersection of disciplines in San Antonio’s artistic community. 

Contemporary at Blue Star
116 Blue Star
San Antonio, TX 78204
(210) 227-6960

PechaKucha San Antonio: A Vibrant Celebration of Art, Culture, and Creativity

The last PechaKucha of 2024 will take place at the historic Scottish Rite. Courtesy photo, used with permission.

SAN ANTONIO, TX – PechaKucha San Antonio – the global arts and culture series that hosts speakers who share their passions in a unique format – is excited to announce its Volume 45 as the final event in the 2024 series. The event is scheduled for Thursday, December 12, 2024, at the Scottish Rite Cathedral in downtown San Antonio (308 Ave E, San Antonio, TX 78205). The night begins with a welcome reception at 6:30p.m., followed by presentations starting at 7:30 p.m. (PechaKucha San Antonio, 2024)

The historic Scottish Rite building was completed in 1924 and serves as the headquarters and meeting place for the Scottish Rite Masonry in San Antonio and for the South Texas region, as well as frequently used for performing arts and other cultural events.

Volume 45 will feature a talented group of local speakers. The seven presenters include:

• Brenda L. Burmeister, Artist and Educator
• Chris Hernandez, Record Hoarder
• Curtis Hunt III, Stone Mason
• Attie Jonker, Master Craftsman
• Andrea “Andi” Rodriguez, Cultural Placemaker
• Emily Royall, Public Interest Technology Expert
• Roberto Treviño, Executive Director

The evening’s emcee will be poet and author Jenny Browne – she has served as the Poet Laureate of both the City of San Antonio and State of Texas, and is a Professor of English and Creative Writing at Trinity University. The welcome reception will feature live music by musicians from the San Antonio Philharmonic. The San Antonio Philharmonic musicians are not only professionals, they are friends and neighbors, working to cultivate the vibrant arts culture that represents the community we all love.

The welcome reception will also include complimentary bites by San Antonio chefs and restaurants including in-kind sponsors Tandem, Naco Mexican Grayson, Beacon Hill Deli, and Olla Express. Additionally the event will feature cocktails available for purchase curated by local bar Amor Eterno.

Tickets are $10 per person and can be purchased online.

A note on venue accessibility: The historic Scottish Rite has stairs leading up to the event space; for an accessibility option from the street level, there will be a livestream watch room available on the ground floor ballroom.

Pronounced “PEH-chuh KOO-chuh,” PechaKucha is a 20 image x 20 second arts and cultures series. We host speakers who share their passions in a unique format: Each presenter gets exactly 20 images, and each slide advances automatically every 20 seconds (for a total time of 6:40).

San Antonio’s first quarterly PechaKucha Night was held in February 2011 and now attracts hundreds of attendees to venues throughout San Antonio. It showcases a broad range of individuals, including architects, artists, makers, academics, community leaders and more. PechaKucha (Japanese for “chit chat”) is an event format developed by Tokyo’s Klein Dytham Architecture to encourage creative professionals to share projects and ideas that they are passionate about. Since it began in 2003, PechaKucha has expanded to more than 1200 cities around the world.

Previous PechaKucha event. Courtesy photo, used with permission.

Actions for the Earth opens at Contemporary at Blue Star

Lhora Amira, IRMANDADE: The Shape of Water in Pindorama, 2018-2020, HD video, single channel sound, film still. Image courtesy of SMAC Gallery, copyright Lhora Amira.

Blue Star Contemporary announces Actions for the Earth: Art, Care & Ecology, an exhibition curated by Sharmila Wood and produced by Independent Curators International (ICI) on view from June 2 through September 3, 2023. Actions for the Earth is a traveling exhibition that considers how artistic practices use kinship, healing, and restorative intervention to foster a deeper consciousness of our interconnectedness with the earth. (Contemporary at Blue Star, 2023)

This exhibition turns to a group of interdisciplinary artists to engage with the overlapping, worldwide crises of our time. Ongoing climate change, entrenched social inequity, and renewed concerns over public health have all underscored the need for approaches that take on global responsibilities while caring for our local environment. For decades, artists have sought to find new antidotes to oppressive structures of power, and promoted greater understanding of the many ways that nature, health, and sustainability are intertwined.

Actions for the Earth presents the work of eighteen intergenerational artists and collectives who place action, instruction, reciprocity, and exchange at the forefront of their practices. By sharing their participatory artistic interventions and healing strategies alongside research in ecology, science, and ancient beliefs, these artists remind us that we are connected within a constellation of living networks, inseparable from the planet and its environments. Artworks on view create space for the honoring of ancestors, foreground the significance of Indigenous knowledges, and engage in speculative imaginings through science fiction and network sciences—organic, digital, and spiritual.

In its curatorial approach, Actions for the Earth acts as a resource for studying our current times. The works on view not only emphasize themes of learning, care, and intimacy, but offer concrete knowledge by inviting the public to participate in actions such as instruction-based meditation and deep listening activities. The life of these works, and the interventions they propose, extends far beyond the scope of the exhibition to engage people in their personal contexts. 

Artists: Ackroyd and Harvey, Lhola Amira, Arahmaiani, Sayan Chanda, Hylozoic/Desires (Himali Singh Soin & David Soin Tappeser), lololol, Ana Mendieta, Zarina Muhammad, Patrina Mununggurr, Pauline Oliveros, Yoko Ono, Tabita Rezaire, Eric-Paul Riege, Cecilia Vicuña, Katie West, and Zheng Bo

Contemporary at Blue Star presents exhibitions with artists from San Antonio and around the world sharing their global perspectives that encourage understanding, empathy, change, and action, fulfilling our mission to inspire, nurture, and innovate. Like most non-collecting contemporary art spaces, the Contemporary contributes fresh insights and perspectives on larger issues affecting society and culture by highlighting trends, movements, and conversations happening in art. Admission to the Contemporary is always free.

Night of Artists showcases the best of today’s western art

The Briscoe Western Art Museum’s annual exhibition and sale proves once again the strength of the genre. Opening weekend events take place March 24 – 25. Photo: Google

If you imagine Western art as dusty, historic relics of the past, you need to set your sights for San Antonio and the Biscoe Western Art Museum’s  2023 Night of Artists Exhibition and Sale, March 24-25. With the opportunity to view and purchase nearly 300 new works of painting, sculpture, and mixed media by 80 of the country’s leading contemporary Western artists, Night of Artists draws artists, collectors and art enthusiasts to the banks of the San Antonio River Walk for two days of unforgettable festivities kicking off one of the premier Western art exhibitions and sales in the world. Beyond the opening celebration, Night of Artists is a public exhibition and sale that spans six weeks at the Briscoe, March 26 – May 7, and is included with general admission to the museum. (Briscoe Western Art Museum, 2023)

The wide range of artwork reflect the vastness of the great American West. From scenic landscapes and inspired Native Americans, classic cowboys, and dazzling vaqueros, to stunning wildlife and detailed portraiture, Night of Artists features something for every art enthusiast. Some of the featured artists include Billy Schenck, Don Oelze, Z.S. Liang, C. Michael Dudash, George Hallmark, Kim Wiggins, Bonnie Marris, Michael Ome Untiedt, Teresa Elliot, and Jan Mapes.

Notable new artists participating this year include Jeremy Lipking, Eric Bowman, Glenn Dean, Dustin Van Wechel, Bob Guelich, Kevin Red Star and Tony Pro.

The Briscoe’s signature event and a must for any collector, Night of Artists, serves as the primary fundraiser for the museum, benefiting the Briscoe’s full array of exhibitions and programs throughout the year. The event’s two-day opening weekend kicks off with the annual Briscoe Bison Society Collectors Summit, where artists, collectors and gallery owners gather to share their insights during panel discussions and conversations exploring the Western art market and trends. Intended for everyone from the novice to the seasoned art collector, the panels feature nationally recognized Western artists, experts and gallery owners. The two-part summit takes place March 24 and March 25 at The Westin Riverwalk.

The Exhibition Preview, Dinner and Live Auction taking place in the Briscoe’s Jack Guenther Pavilion on the banks of the San Antonio River Walk unfolds on March 24 with an evening of cocktails in the Night of Artists exhibition, an elegant, seated dinner, and a spirited live auction. Conducted by Troy Black, the live auction features 35 separate works.

The Night of Artists Awards Luncheon takes place March 25, honoring the artists in this year’s exhibition and recognizing the annual award winners.

Night of Artists’ signature event, the Exhibition Opening, Art Sale and Reception, takes place March 25. This memorable evening includes the “Luck of the Draw” Art Sale, where works of art are available for purchase at a fixed price established by the artist. Attendees receive a ballot book and place an intent to purchase slip in the box next to a work of art they would like to purchase. When time expires, two slips are randomly drawn, allowing the first drawee the opportunity to purchase the piece or pass it along to the second drawee. All the excitement happens to the tune of live music under the stars in the museum’s McNutt Sculpture Garden.

Tickets for all Night of Artists events are available online or by calling 210.299.4499. The Night of Artists public exhibition will be on display during regular museum hours March 26 – May 7 and is included in museum admission. Unsold works during opening weekend will be available for purchase both in-person and online.