Rediscovering Michael Tracy At The McNay Art Museum In San Antonio

“Michael Tracy: The Elegy of Distance” at the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio shares more than the artist’s work, it shares his world.

San Ygnacio, TX, where Tracy (1943-2024) lived and located his studio beginning in 1978. The Texas-Mexico borderlands. Mexico City, where he also had a studio, spending a great deal of time there beginning in the 1970s. India, where he traveled regularly for two decades, making jewelry.

“It’s very much an environmental experience,” exhibition curator René Paul Barilleaux told Forbes.com about the presentation. “It a complete immersion into a world that he conceived.”

Sights, sounds, and smells converge across six galleries. Yes, smells. The exhibition features bespoke aromas.

“It was always going to be an incense scent,” Barilleaux remembers. “We had discussions about whether it’s the kind of incense used in Roman Catholic ritual, a kind of frankincense incense, or if it (was) going to be incense like you find in India. In the end, we decided to focus on the scent you would smell in India. It has a more floral scent to it, and it’s pumped out of a little diffuser that’s in the gallery that wafts into the air.”

Barilleaux began working with Tracy on the exhibition in late 2023 all the way through the artist’s death in June 2024. “The Elegy of Distance” marks the final presentation of his work Tracy was directly involved with. As such, the show takes on his personality in a way posthumous exhibitions typically can’t.

“He was certainly strong willed and had very specific opinions about everything, but that was helpful because we came to understand what he wanted out of this project, the kind of imagery he wanted to show, the mood he wanted to set,” Barilleaux said of the notoriously cantankerous artist. “His personality was really helpful to me in formulating what this show would look like.”

And sound like.

The exhibition features an original soundscape by musical composer Omar Zubair, who Tracy was acquainted with.

“(Zubair) created five different soundscapes that alternate through the space. As you move through (the exhibition), you hear different kinds of sounds,” Barilleaux explained. “Sometimes nature. Sometimes more like a ritual sound. Sometimes it’s the sound of bells chiming, all these different kind of sound experiences, sometimes it’s just silence.”

A moody, darkened, meditative gallery recalls a chapel.

Tracy was raised Roman Catholic in the midcentury with all its attendant repression. Even more so for Tracy, who was gay. His artwork is flush with references to the church.

“Even from the beginning, he was borrowing from the kind of theater and pageantry of Catholic ritual,” Barilleaux said. “Things like processionals, the various kinds of sacred objects, he was fascinated by all of that, so he incorporated that into his work. Drawing on liturgical vestments, garments, he even designed liturgical vestments, all of that theater you find in Catholicism, he was drawn to that.”

Art history as well. As perfectly stated by Texas-centric arts publication Glasstire, “(Tracy) incorporated the dramatic sensuality of European baroque painting and the vivid pageantry of Catholic ritual.”

This particular elongated gallery has benches on either side for visitors to sit, recalling pews.

“Michael designed furniture, designed jewelry, and did a lot of other projects that helped sustain him over the years when he was not selling his paintings so rapidly; we wanted to bring that into the show,” Barilleaux said. “That was one of the other things about Michael’s process, he worked with a lot of crafts people who would make things to compliment what he was working on and to incorporate in his environments.”

San Ygnacio

Most museum goers won’t be familiar with Tracy unless they were similarly engaged with contemporary art, particularly in Texas, in the 1970s, when Tracy was a rising star. Poetically, in 1971, the McNay, then the Marion Koogler McNay Art Institute, hosted Tracy’s first-ever museum exhibition, “Seven Gold Paintings.”

Tracy was a big deal then, fresh out of the University of Texas at Austin with a master’s degree in studio art. Avant-garde. Bold, maximal artworks challenging religion and American intervention in Latin America. Provocative performance art pieces.

He had a major presence in San Antonio at the time with devoted collectors and dealers, leading to the first McNay show.

Tracy then made the unusual choice of unplugging from the art world, moving from Galveston to tiny San Ygnacio, population under 1,000 along the Rio Grande, a town as much Mexican as American. His self-imposed exile slammed the breaks on his ascendant career.

“He was interested to get out of the urban environment he was in in Galveston and Houston and the crazy art world that was coming to be there,” Barilleaux explained. “He was looking for solitude. He was looking for a place where he could just focus on his work. Someone took him to (San Ygnacio) and he fell in love with it. He was particularly interested in migration, and the people who were migrating through, crossing the border, the stories you would hear, the people you would meet.”

In a passage from Tracy’s 1992 book “The River Pierce: Sacrifice II, 13.4.90,” he states:

“Living on the ‘northern’ edge of the Rio Grande, on what officially is the edge of Latin America, has had immeasurable impact on my life and work. I have had a front-row seat in the ongoing drama of two distinct cultures hemorrhaging into each other; the physical migration itself, the cultural nullity, the sociological angst and despair, and the legal miasma. The monstrous political cynicism has infected my soul and heart, and probably my body.”

Mostly forgotten, even in Texas, when Tracy resurfaced and reconnected with McNay officials, what they found was astonishing.

“The bodies of work that we saw had not been seen by anyone,” Barilleaux said. “It was like this operatic crash of works that needed to be seen. We felt this energy that needed to be exposed and that we needed to bring forth to the public.”

Surveying the second half of Tracy’s six-decade career through more than 50 objects, “The Elegy of Distance” is anchored by large paintings hanging nearly ceiling to floor. The works, many of which Tracy selected before his passing, are made of thick paint, discarded supplies, sand and other materials referencing the desert landscape around San Ygnacio.

The vivid colors and cultures of Mexico and India as well.

“Some of the same things he’s drawn to in Mexico (attracted him to India); the street theater, the color, the climate, the sense of spirituality that’s hanging over everything, the smells, the smell of incense, all of those sensual things,” Barilleaux said. “The palette of his paintings is influenced by all those things he saw.”

Mexico and India are a world apart, but share a fervor for vibrant public spectacles centered on religion, festivals and rituals Tracy found intoxicating.

Tracy could go dark as well.

Seven paintings from his “Speaking with the Dead” (2013-2015) series ooze with varying shades of charcoal and black acrylic, thickly layered on the canvas to communicate the relationship between decay and preservation. Cruz de la Paz Sagrada VII (1980), a bracketed cross that stands more than 70 inches tall, is composed of heart-shaped Milagros, hair, swords, rosaries, human hair, spikes and scissors.

Also included are sculptures and mixed-media objects from the artist’s personal holdings alongside artworks on loan from other collections. These powerful works, rich with layered paint, found materials, sand and other organic elements, invite contemplation on themes of faith, ritual, immigration, and the environment.

“Michael Tracy: The Elegy of Distance” can be seen through July 27, 2025.

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