SAMA Audio Tours
My name is Christine, and I am a senior at Trinity University. This summer, I was offered the opportunity to participate in an internship at SAMA through Trinity’s Arts, Letters, and Enterprise (ALE) program. I spent ten weeks in the Museum’s marketing department, helping with various projects, including creating short, funny videos for social media and e-blasts to let subscribers know about upcoming programs and events at the Museum and some of the great stuff available at the Museum Shop. Working alongside the marketing team—and various other lovely staff members who were generous enough to let me ask for their life stories—has opened my eyes to all the different, fascinating roles that make up a museum.
As an anthropology major, I’ve known I wanted to go into the museum industry for several years, which was why I applied for this opportunity back in January. As I played my part in supporting several departmental projects, I realized that there are many skills I have learned in my anthropology coursework that apply surprisingly well to creating marketing campaigns.
As I round out my time here, I am ready to share one of my projects: two audio self-guided tours that are now available to visitors. The project was inspired by the self-guided tour brochures available at the Museum’s front desk. I always thought their themes were so fun and engaging, from the tour about superheroes across time to the one for visitors on a date. These seemed to be such a delightful and unique way of interacting with the Museum’s collections in a way that speaks to the visitors’ own interests.
With this inspiration in mind, I started the journey of creating audio versions of the Blueprints: Mapping Color in Culture and Art on Tap: Brewery Tour brochures, complete with narration, background soundscapes, and directional assistance. To access them, check out the playlists on SAMA’s YouTube channel (@sanantoniomuseumofart). I hope you enjoy these audio tours as much as I enjoyed making them!
—Christine Gonzalez, ALE Intern
Blueprints
Where would we be without the color blue? Before modern, synthetic pigments were developed, blue was a rare and famously difficult hue to manufacture. As such, blue has been prized throughout art history and carries many deeply meaningful connotations. Follow along with this self-guided audio tour throughout the Museum to explore the fascinating history of blue.
Art on Tap
As with much of downtown San Antonio, the San Antonio Museum of Art is brimming with history. Originally the Lone Star Brewery, this historic building complex underwent many stages of life throughout the twentieth century, housing a cotton mill, an auto repair shop, and a uniform storage business, among other commercial ventures, before becoming the museum we know and love today. Follow along with this self-guided audio tour to discover the remnants of SAMA’s brewing past.
