The popular immersive art experience Meow Wolf has come to Texas, and many of the recent public art works that appear in the book have quickly become an integral part of the city's visual fabric, telling the stories of San Antonio for itself and for the world. In 1982, the city made an exceptional effort to enter the public art sphere when it approved a sculpture of labor leader Samuel Gompers made of sandstone and oyster shells. However, in the early 1980s, Chicano artists painted murals on the walls of the Cassiano public housing project, on the historically Mexican-American West Side. On a wall on the corner of New Braunfels and Hays Streets, in the historic African-American East Side of San Antonio, a bright mural depicts a bacchanal of black, brown and white people dancing to the rhythm of a raucous jazz band.
In the decades since then, nonprofit organizations such as the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center, the Luminaria nighttime art festival, MujerArtes, San Anto Cultural Arts, and SAY Sí have trained, recruited, and commissioned artists to create new works throughout the city. By the late eighties, small galleries, the Blue Star Contemporary and an adjacent art complex in the city center, had opened. Building on the legacy of works by Mexican muralists such as David Alfaro Siqueiros, Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and Juan O'Gorman (whose vast mosaic mural Confluence of Civilizations in the Americas premiered at the 1968 San Antonio Hemisfair), the grassroots Community Cultural Arts Organization finally recruited high school and high school students to create more than 125 murals that adorn schools, parks, and centers for the elderly. At a traffic roundabout in the center of the city, two large purple steel pillars created by the Mexican artist Sebastián rise up as if some elemental terrestrial energy had been unleashed and began to take shape.
In their introduction to People's Art, Tafolla and Preston see the rise of public art in San Antonio as part of the city's 300-year-old journey to knowing itself. A common theme in San Antonio's public artworks is a fascination with the role that water has played in the city's economic and cultural development. Hays County officials have recently asked Attorney General Ken Paxton to determine if a new state law overrides their policy of denying weapons in a county building that includes courtrooms, prosecutor's offices and grand jury room. Officials in Hays County have decided to reduce their government center's gun-free zone in light of Paxton's opinion.
However, other counties continue to maintain a ban on carrying weapons in their court buildings such as Dallas County and Potter County in Amarillo. The problem is that Hays County Government Center in San Marcos includes court-related offices where guns are prohibited as well as places where weapons are normally allowed to be used such as tax assessor-tax collector's office and elections office.
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