Exhibitions: Past

One of the San Antonio Museum of Art’s most-loved collections, hidden in storage during the construction of the new Asian Art Wing, will once again be on display for the public next spring. Museum director Dr. Marion Oettinger, Jr. has announced a March 2, 2008 reopening date for the new installation of the Museum’s collection of Greek, Etruscan and Roman works of art.

The San Antonio Museum of Art has the largest public collection of Greek, Etruscan, and Roman antiquities in Texas, and its collections of Greek vases and Roman sculptures are of national importance.

  Since 1990, these collections have been housed in the Gilbert Denman and Estelle Blackburn Galleries, which are part of the Ewing Halsell Wing.  Both galleries were closed to the public in late 2002 for the construction of the Lenora and Walter F. Brown Asian Art Wing.  The Blackburn Gallery, with the museum's Greek vases and Greek, Etruscan and Roman metal and terracotta objects, reopened in 2006 but has been closed since August 2007 for reinstallation. The Denman Gallery has not been open to the public since 2002.

The reinstallation will create two culturally distinct galleries, with the Greek collection in the Blackburn Gallery and the Etruscan and Roman collections in the Denman Gallery. 

The works of art will be subdivided into chronological and thematic groups within each gallery.  In the Blackburn Gallery, these include Greece in the Bronze Age (3000-1100 B.C.), the Greek World (1100-323 B.C.), the Hellenistic Period (323-31 B.C.), and a selection of gold jewelry and coins.  The Denman Gallery will have areas devoted to Etruscan Art, Roman Portraiture, Roman Funerary Sculpture, and Mythological Sculpture.