Beauty Reigns: A Baroque Sensibility in Recent Painting assembles the work of 13 emerging and mid-career abstract painters--Jose Alvarez, Kamrooz Aram, Charles Burwell, Annette Davidek, Fausto Fernandez, Nancy Lorenz, Ryan McGinness, Beatriz Milhazes, Jiha Moon, Paul Henry Ramirez, Rex Ray, Rosalyn Schwartz and Susan Chrysler White--whose art is characterized by high-key color, obsessive layering of surface imagery, repeated patterns, stylized motifs and a tension between melancholy and the sublime. It builds directly on Barilleaux’s award-winning exhibition and book New Image Sculpture, which examined how contemporary artists transform widely available, often non-art materials into fanciful replications of the ordinary. Beauty Reigns identifies a recent trend towards exoticism, exuberance and optimism.

Beauty Reigns: A Baroque Sensibility in Recent Painting

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

McNay Art Museum

O'Keeffe and Texas

This is a study of the formative period in the career of the American abstract artist, Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986). The colour reproductions in the book, which was published to accompany an exhibition held at the Marion Koogler MacNay Art Museum in San Antonio, Texas, in the spring of 1998, present powerful images made in Texas between 1912 and 1918 - all of them different from the flowers and animal bones normally associated with O'Keeffe's work. The author sets out to show how the powerful light and stark landscape of Texas resonate throughout the paintings, and offers an examination of how the themes developed by the artist in Texas continued to affect her artistic vision over the next half-century.

Udall, Sharyn Rohlfsen

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Clothbound book with dust jacket still in original shrink wrap.

From Goya to Johns: Fifty Master Prints from the McNay Art Museum

Williams, Lyle W.

Other Media

As our culture relocates into digital realms, numerous artists have returned to a studio practice grounded in “doing” and “making.” New Image Sculpture unites the work of artists who freely borrow from the worlds of ethnographic and material culture, folk art, fashion, hobby crafts, DIY and the shelves of Home Depot.

New Image Sculpture

Heartney, Eleanor

Barilleaux, Rene Paul

This catalog documents Lesley Dill's emotionally evocative work in performance and brings together a number of performance garments, works of art, ephemera, photographs and video from more than two decades. These pieces demonstrate Dill's ability to juxtapose language with sculptural elements in a wide range of materials.

Lesley Dill: Performance As Art

Jody Blake

Lesley Dill

Telling Tales presents a survey of work by artists who record stories through pictures, whether real or imagined. Sixteen groundbreaking photographers are featured, including such greats as Gregory Crewdson, Nan Goldin, Jessica Todd Harper, Erwin Olaf and others, with photographs spanning the early 1970s to the present. While some contemporary artists explore photographic imagery as it is mediated by technology, these artists exploit photography’s ability to present a momentary, frozen narrative. Images are staged for the camera or highly manipulated through digital processes, yet they often resemble a casual snapshot or movie still. Primarily in color and often large-scale, the photographs reference everything from classical painting and avant-garde cinema to science fiction illustration and Alfred Hitchcock.

Telling Tales: Contemporary Narrative Photography

Photography & Video

Exhibition catalogue of the first retrospective of San Antonio photographic artist Chuck Ramirez. 82 pages with beautiful color reproductions throughout the book.

Chuck Ramirez: All This and Heaven Too

Chuck Ramirez

San Antonio has a long and distinguished history of collecting African American Art. In the late 1980s, Harmon and Harriet Kelley began acquiring paintings, drawings, and prints for their home. Their collection grew and toured the nation, and private collectors and public institutions took notice. The Kelley Collection of works on paper was presented at the McNay Art Museum (2009); followed by the Amon Carter Museum in Ft. Worth, Texas; the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery in Lincoln, Nebraska; the California African American Museum in Los Angeles, California; the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts in Pennsylvania; and recently the El Paso Museum of Art in Texas. Individual paintings from their collection were also lent to major exhibitions such as the Norman Lewis retrospective (2016) and to museum permanent collection galleries. The Kelley's generosity has enabled cultural institutions across the U.S. to tell more truthful and inclusive histories of art.

Something to Say: The McNay Presents 100 Years of African American Art

Lowery Stokes Sims

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Books by McNay Art Museum