UTSA’s ‘VOZ’ testifies to San Antonio as a Chicano art capital Elaine Ayala Feb. 11, 2018
Arturo Infante Almeida has spent so much of his career as a curator, art dealer and an advocate and promoter of artists, he doesn’t quite know how to soak up attention at an exhibit, even when he has mounted it. He’s usually the guy guiding people in front of a painting he thinks they’ll want to see; sharing back stories of artists and their works; and canvasing the gallery for anything out of place. It’s that eye. It can’t stop working. Over almost two decades, he has helped assemble the University of Texas at San Antonio’s art collection, through acquisitions and donations. It now contains 2,600 works and is reaching the $4 million mark. Almeida has mounted about 200 exhibits. At Centro de Artes at Market Square until June 10, “VOZ: Selections from the UTSA Art Collection” may well represent the pinnacle of a career that started with selling art from his car trunk. At Thursday night’s smashing opening, Almeida looked a little uncomfortable, a little emotional in the spotlight. The 222 pieces by 166 artists —people whose work Almeida knows well, some of whom he has seen emerge to prominence — point to a man who has deeply influenced its scope. Almeida is quick to credit former UTSA president Ricardo Romo, who hired and empowered him. Romo, who retired after a sexual harassment scandal, made art a budget priority. He brought to the university the goal of building an art collection. Almeida, an artist who does photo collages, put the art and artists in front of him, visiting studios, going to shows, talking to artists. He was doing such work long before arriving at UTSA, representing 19 artists. He was running Café Latino, a coffeehouse on North Main Street, where he peddled sandwiches, empanadas and artists. He had traveled to New York and Los Angeles to see how cafes operated as galleries. Romo was a regular. Many of those early artists became part of UTSA’s collection and are vividly represented in VOZ. They’re packed onto Centro’s wall space, as evidence of San Antonio’s status as a Latino art capital in a city central to the U.S. Latino experience.