San Antonio’s McNay Art Museum, Texas’s Modern Art Pioneer

Bright-orange ceramic goldfish float in a turquoise bedroom, green cats cavort in an abandoned kitchen after a nuclear-plant meltdown, and trees and people made of wool fiber dance on grass made of pipe cleaners. Those are three fantasy worlds — fun, bizarre, unsettling — created by Sandy Skoglund (b. 1946) for Enchanting Nature at the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio, Texas. I’d never been to the McNay, which, when it opened in 1954, was Texas’s first modern art museum. It’s an enchanting place, with a distinctive collection and setting based on a maverick vision from the days when Texas had lots of oil, cattle, ambition, and wide-open spaces but next to no good art.

I was last in San Antonio in 2020. I’d written plenty that spring about art museums staying shut to the public long after Covid could still be called a public health threat. It’s no surprise that the first two museums in the country to reopen were in can-do, commonsense Texas. When the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and the San Antonio Museum of Art both reopened to the public in mid-May 2020, I felt obliged to visit. There was lots of hand sanitizer available as well as those useless six-foot distance markers on the floors. No one died.

About the Author

Brian T. Allen

Brian T. Allen is National Review’s art critic.

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Bright-orange ceramic goldfish float in a turquoise bedroom, green cats cavort in an abandoned kitchen after a nuclear-plant meltdown, and trees and people made of wool fiber dance on grass made of pipe cleaners. Those are three fantasy worlds — fun, bizarre, unsettling — created by Sandy Skoglund (b. 1946) for Enchanting Nature at the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio, Texas. I’d never been to the McNay, which, when it opened in 1954, was Texas’s first modern art museum. It’s an enchanting place, with a distinctive collection and setting based on a maverick vision from the days when Texas had lots of oil, cattle, ambition, and wide-open spaces but next to no good art.

I was last in San Antonio in 2020. I’d written plenty that spring about art museums staying shut to the public long after Covid could still be called a public health threat. It’s no surprise that the first two museums in the country to reopen were in can-do, commonsense Texas. When the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and the San Antonio Museum of Art both reopened to the public in mid-May 2020, I felt obliged to visit. There was lots of hand sanitizer available as well as those useless six-foot distance markers on the floors. No one died.