Concrete Artisans Leaving Lasting Imprint in San Antonio

SAY Si, where art is spoken.

Z. Smith ’12

Conventions come and go. San Antonians barely notice their arrivals and departures. But professional artisans are getting a head start to ensure we remember the Concrete Decor Show, February 20-24.

This past week, they have been working with students to transform bare concrete around the entrance of SAY Si into a major display of the artistic side of the craft. A “river” will soon spill out of the building and over the entry ramp:

From the double-glass doors of the entrance, a micro-topping in vivid tones of blues and greens will progress down the sidewalk and descend a vertical wall to terminate in the landscaping. A team of national trainers from Miracote and Butterfield Color, aided by local concrete contractors, will install an earth-toned stampable overlay and add pattern and texture adjacent to the river mural. SAY Si students will add the finishing touches. They will illustrate native flora and fauna along the faux river bank, and permanent inscriptions of words the students find inspiring will punctuate the surrounding areas.

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Concrete cosmetology – 5,000 square feet of it – will continue at SAY Si during the conference itself. According to the show coordinators:

Project teams, pairing industry experts with workshop participants, will create the ultimate makeovers of old, worn and unattractive concrete surfaces. Each area presents a building problem or unique challenge that the team will solve using products donated by leading architectural and decorative concrete manufacturers….

Inside SAY Si, workshop participants will apply a polyaspartic coating in the public gallery where the works of SAY Si students are exhibited. Old concrete floors in several studios where classes are held will be renovated. Two different techniques will be used: grinding and polishing an existing concrete slab and resurfacing another area with an innovative new polishable overlay technology. A special metallic epoxy coating will be applied on the floor in the Black Box theater….

Board member Susan Toomey Frost can barely contain her excitement over this major focus on a sometimes overlooked craft that is part of San Antonio’s heritage. Jon Hinojosa, artistic and executive director of SAY Si, is thrilled over the makeover because:

This project will not only showcase creative concrete master craftsmen, but allow our students to participate and learn a new art form.

And:

SAY Si is a family connected through art.

S. Ramos ’11

Most popular posts of 2011….

Time for the biannual summary of the posts clicked on most. Some of my favorites have fallen aside, but seven posts from the list six months ago remain, with Cheez Doodles still dominating.

1. Cheez Doodles as Art (1), posted on January 8, 2011
2. Obsession preserves a slice of time in Mexico, posted on November 4, 2011
3. “Nuit of the Living Dead” (6), posted on October 30, 2010
4. Ban the Banner (2), posted on August 8, 2010
5. Alamollywood Part I: Are the Daughters Extremely Savvy or Starstruck? (3), posted on January 2, 2011
6. Susan Toomey Frost stimulates a second revival of San Antonio’s traditional tilework, posted on June 24, 2011
7. ‘Loanership’ program leads to Texas Centennial series of prints opening at King William Art, posted on May 28, 2011
8. Please put this song on Tony’s pony, and make it ride away (9), posted on July 25, 2010
9. Best Restaurant in Valladolid (5), Plus Warning, posted on March 17, 2010
10. Preserving the Art of ‘Papel Picado’ (10), posted on April 30, 2010
11. Oh, no! Not the Alamo (again). Can the lost mission of St. Anthony be found?, posted on June 11, 2011
12. ’1,2,3. What do you see?’ Too many toucans to count., posted on August 9, 2011

Thanks for following, and love receiving feedback. You have once again given me license to exercise absolutely no discipline in selecting topics about which to blog.

Kersey’s pieces like portable public art you can throw in the dishwasher

To get an idea of the sculptural beauty of coffee mugs crafted by potter Diana Kersey, ride across the Mulberry Street Bridge or the Millrace Bridge leading to the Brackenridge Park Golf Course. Each of these bridges is graced with more than 200 square feet of the artist’s figurative tiles.

At first, I felt silly interviewing someone who recently completed these two major public art installations about coffee mugs, but Kersey put me at ease. Yes, she still loves taking a lump of clay and shaping it into a mug as her potter’s wheel turns.

“Small projects allow me to explore design ideas,” Kersey said. “These small works play into the design elements of larger ones.” Plus, she is never bored because: “No two mugs are exactly alike.”

Gayle Brennan Spencer in San Antonio Taste Magazine, December 2011

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Steve Bennett spotlighted the first bridge Diana Kersey completed on the San Antonio River in a June edition of the San Antonio Express-News:

“The city wanted me to do something on the health of waterways,” Kersey said. “I started thinking about amphibians — you know, if the amphibian life was healthy then the waterway was probably healthy. And in doing my research I learned that the most common toad in this region is the Gulf Coast toad. It’s the one that we all know, that we all run across in our backyards.”

In bas-relief sculptural panels embedded in the bridge’s concrete guardrails above 8-foot sidewalks, Kersey visually tells the story of the life cycle of the toad, from the courting days of Mr. and Mrs. T to strips of frog egg “tape” floating on water to developing tadpoles and “froglets” to the mature toad with the ridges over the eyes and the mouth that turns downward, sort of sadly. The overall effect is a “primordial narrative” like the well-known ape-to-man evolutionary image.

The Millrace Bridge installation was scattered around the tables and floor of her studio when I interviewed Kersey for the story on coffee mugs. The clay since has been glazed and fired to attain striking colors evoking the exuberance of majolica pottery.

Kersey described how she takes clay large-scale in an interview with Gene Elder for Voices of Art Magazine:

I don’t really create ’tiles’ in the traditional sense. I build the panel as one giant piece of clay, and then when it is complete I cut the work up into smaller shapes that can easily be fired, transported and installed. That way the grout lines becomes an important part of the overall design.

Now installed, the panels on the bridge relate to the history of the park and the golf course. Gutzon Borglum, who worked on designs for Mt. Rushmore in his nearby studio, and George Brackenridge, looking a bit dour as one would expect from the man who forbade the consumption of malt beverages on the parkland he donated, are among the relief portraits in clay.

But the story of Queenie the dog stumped me completely? Kersey enlightened me:

Queenie the dog was the beloved dog of Jack O’Brien. Mr. O’Brien was a sportswriter for an early San Antonio paper and a huge fan of golf at Brackenridge. He helped start the Texas Open in the early years. Anyhow, the dog was always by his side and became a bit of a mascot at Old Brack. A portrait of her has hung in the clubhouse for over 60 years and is still there.

Kersey’s mugs are like small slivers of portable public art that you can take home with you – art that can be thrown in the dishwasher. Find Kersey at work in her new studio and showroom downtown in the Atlee Ayers Building at 112 Broadway.

On-screen affairs and abortions in the 1930s?

From my boomer perspective, I always envisioned that, aside from the out of control wild times of the flapper days, life in the first half of the 20th century was ruled by more prudes than even encountered in the late 1950s.

However, while working out today, I watched part of a Turner classic film from 1933 that altered my opinion of life in that decade. Ann Vickers, starring Irene Dunne and Walter Huston, was based on a novel by Sinclair Lewis released only a few months earlier than the film itself. Reviewing the book for Scribner’s Magazine, critic Eli Siegel harshly concluded:

I suppose, therefore, that all laudatory adjectives could be used about Mr. Lewis’s last novel except those meaning that it was great.

Warning: Plot-spoiling ahead.

Not having read the novel, what amazes me is the topics dealt with quite openly in the screen version of Ann Vickers. This movie would not have passed the test of whatever Catholic rating system my mother would quote in order to forbid my viewing almost anything other than a Disney cartoon. The main character in the plot:

• Rejects suitors to choose a career over marriage
• Is close friends with an independent female physician
• Has an affair with a cad off to World War I
• Gets pregnant
• Has an abortion
• Takes a job in a woman’s prison
• Is unwittingly framed in a compromising photo and blackmailed by those running the prison
• Exposes the poor treatment of inmates in prison
• Falls in love with a judge whose wife is running around with a paramour in Europe yet refuses to divorce him
• Falls in love with said judge just as he is set to be charged for insider trading
• Has an illegitimate son with the judge
• And, when the now-divorced judge is paroled after three years, seems poised to live happily ever after…..

1933? Surely this movie must have been banned or have ended the career of Irene Dunne? But Dunne’s career was hot; she was gaining a reputation as the “First Lady of Hollywood.” And the contemporary review of Ann Vickers written by Mordaunt Hall for The New York Times barely raises an eyebrow about the subject matter and does not warn viewers of its mature content:

Although it cannot be said that the shadows passing on the screen are definite replicas of the characters drawn by the author, the incidents are invariably interesting although never suspenseful. More often than not the natures of the persons involved are hinted at rather than adroitly delineated, and the narrative, which touches on many phases of Ann’s eventful career, is somewhat too episodical. Owing to the fact that the producers have captured more than a mere suggestion of the spirit of the author, the picture holds one’s attention.

Under the “Trivia” section of The Internet Movie Database, I learned the plot did arouse some pushback from the Hays Office of censorship in 1933 and later, in 1935, a denial of an “approved” rating that probably destined the film for obscurity:

Some objections were made by the Hays Office concerning the plot of the first draft of the screenplay, where Ann marries Captain Resnick and then has an affair with Barney. The plot was changed to Ann being seduced by the Captain with the offense somehow deemed less if only one of the parties in the adulterous affair is married. No reference is made about any abortion in the trip to Havana, and in the released print the cause of death of Ann’s baby girl is never mentioned. RKO applied for an “Approved” certificate in 1935, when the production code was more rigorously enforced, but they were informed that no certificate would be given because of the film’s attitude towards adultery.

In the midst of all of the scandalous behavior in the film that  reviewer Hall seemingly ignored:

 

Miss Dunne, as has been mentioned, acquits herself favorably.

 

While Ann Vickers is far from an outstanding film, it is worth watching for its alternative view of life in the 1930s. And, for the same reason, I was hoping to download the book to my Kindle. Alas, it is not available. Nor is it a title in the catalog of the San Antonio Public Library, so I have resorted to ordering a used copy via snail mail.