YANAGUANA, 2015
Alex Rubio, with Blue Star Contemporary Art Museum MOSAIC student artists Yenifer Gaviña-Franco, Zoe Palacios, Nicholas Pinales, and Leslie Reynolds
Acrylic on Polytab fabric on board
Alex Rubio
YANAGUANA at the Art Wall
YANAGUANA is designed by renowned muralist and Blue Star Contemporary Art Museum MOSAIC Artist-in-Residence Alex Rubio, and created with the help of his students from the museum’s after-school program for student artists, MOSAIC. The education and community outreach program provides professional mentoring in the arts to area high school students. A sense of ownership is created in the communal act of creating a mural. The movement and flow of the painting incorporates the natural colors of the park in a playful abstraction of land, river and sky inspired by the origin myths of “Yanaguana,” as the region was called by its indigenous peoples.
The mural was painted on four fabric panels, offsite in the MOSAIC Studio at Blue Star. Onsite, Alex and his team affixed the fabric to wood panels mounted to the building. The design is Alex Rubio’s, but the execution was a team effort, giving the MOSAIC students a unique opportunity to participate in a highly visible public art project.
YANAGUANA is the first iteration of Art Wall, a rotating series of murals created for Yanaguana Garden at Hemisfair Park.
Alex Rubio is currently the MOSAIC Artist-In-Residence at the Blue Star Contemporary Art Museum in Southtown. As an arts organizer, he has worked with many community-based public art programs including: Community Cultural Arts Organization, Bexar County Detention Center Inmate Creative Art Program, Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center, and San Anto Cultural Arts. As a studio artist, Rubio continues to illustrate and describe past and present life in San Antonio, documenting both cultural and personal experiences in his drawings and paintings. Rubio utilizes iconic imagery in an effort to preserve the cultural bond that connects and promotes inter-generational dialogue within and beyond our communities.
Alex Rubio’s artwork has been shown widely nationally, including touring exhibitions Chicano Vision Cheech Marin Collection and Selected Works from the Joe Diaz Collection. Locally, his work has been included in numerous exhibitions including Psychedelic at the San Antonio Museum of Art, Exodus at the Blue Star Contemporary Art Museum, and Estampas De La Rasa at the McNay Museum of Art. He has received national recognition with art grants from the Joan Mitchell Foundation in New York, Vermont Studio Center, and was selected as an International Artist-in-Residence at Artpace San Antonio.
Artist Website: www.bluestarart.org/education
