San Antonio Museum of Art Announces Significant New Acquisitions

Additions include works by Bell, Toranzo Jaeger, and Rangel Ramos, and from notable collectors Romo and Vexler

San Antonio, TX—January 23, 2026—The San Antonio Museum of Art announced the acquisition of several remarkable works that will further enhance the Museum’s contemporary, Latin American, and ancient Mediterranean collections. The acquisitions are highlighted by five significant gifts from prominent collectors: over sixty works on paper by Latin American and Latinx artists, given by Drs. Ricardo and Harriett Romo; 103 Mexican textiles and weaving implements, given by Dr. Jill Vexler; 104 photographs, given by Marie Brenner and Ernest Pomerantz; sixteen Egyptian objects, given by Chris Karcher and Karen Keach; and two of Larry Bell’s early experimental works, given by Michael W. Rabkin and Chip Tom.

The Museum also acquired works by contemporary artists Frieda Toranzo Jaeger and César Rangel Ramos. Toranzo Jaeger has received international attention for her distinct approach to painting that interweaves diverse artistic and cultural histories, including Indigenous embroidery traditions, Northern Renaissance religious altars, and Mexican muralism. Rangel Ramos draws inspiration from Catholicism, Mesoamerican religious traditions, and ancient Greco-Roman ideas, bringing them together with an innovative technique of applying friction and fluid to a fixed surface, which the artist calls "albigraphy.”

The gift from the Romos features works in a range of techniques, including photography, lithography, screenprint, and linocut. It features works by some of the most notable twentieth-century Mexican artists, such as David Alfaro Siqueiros, Carlos Mérida, and Francisco Toledo, as well as contemporary artists, including Juan de Dios Mora, Carmen Lomas Garza, Patssi Valdez, and Vincent Valdez. These works add to a collection of over 460 works on paper by Latin American and Latinx artists gifted to SAMA by the Romos.

The group of textiles and objects in Vexler’s gift include multiple items that she collected in the 1970s and 1980s while researching the traditional dress of Nahua communities in Puebla. Among them are children’s clothes, women’s daily wear blouses, menswear, and festive garments.  This gift also includes several historical garments collected by Vexler’s mother, Esther Scharlack Vexler. This gift strengthens SAMA’s extensive collection of Mexican textiles, accompanied by extensive documentation of the makers’ contexts and techniques. 

The gift from Brenner and Pomerantz includes images by American photographers Herb Snitzer and Erika Stone, vintage press photographs of the Vietnam War by two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Horst Faas, and Associated Press wirephotos that connect with major historical events of the twentieth century. This gift builds on the generosity of the two collectors, who have given more than 1,400 photographs to SAMA since 2012. 

The Egyptian objects in the gift from Karcher and Keach were collected in the early twentieth century by noted Egyptologist Keith C. Seele. They include a stone fragment of a royal portrait (ca. 747–656 BC), a travertine offering stand (ca. 2686–2181 BC), and stone and clay vessels. The group will add depth to SAMA’s extensive collection and complement works on view in the Egyptian galleries. 

“We are thrilled to add more than two hundred objects to our collection with these new acquisitions, with an emphasis on our Latin American and contemporary collections,” said Emily Ballew Neff, PhD, The Kelso Director at SAMA. “I also want to thank our generous donors and the curatorial team for shepherding these acquisitions, in support of our goal to continually grow and diversify our collections with works that hold the stories of global cultures across time.”  

Select highlights from this year’s acquisition include:
 Larry Bell (American, born 1939), Untitled, 1968, Aluminum and silicone monoxide on mirrored glass, framed: 9 3/4 × 8 1/8 in. (24.8 × 20.7 cm), San Antonio Museum of Art, gift of Michael W. Rabkin and Chip Tom, 2025.11.1 © Larry Bell

Larry Bell (American, born 1939), Untitled (Strip), 1968-1970, Aluminum and silicone monoxide on plate glass, 73 1/4 × 2 1/4 × 3/8 in. (186.1 × 5.7 × 1 cm), San Antonio Museum of Art, gift of Michael W. Rabkin and Chip Tom, 2025.11.2 © Larry Bell

One of the most significant contemporary artists, Larry Bell has been highly influential since the late 1960s when he became known for his signature floating glass cubes. For over five decades, Bell has dedicated his career to exploring the interaction of light and surface by transforming industrial materials, such as glass, into works of art. Using a vacuum deposition chamber that he named “the Tank,” Bell applies ultra-thin metallic coatings onto his materials, which create brilliant optical effects.

The untitled work from 1968 is from a critical period when Bell was exploring technical processes to produce varying perceptual effects. The untitled work from 1970 is a rare piece in that Bell only created a small number of these sculptures between 1968 and 1970. When mounted on the wall and illuminated, the coated glass produces subtle reflections on its surroundings. These early experimental works join others by the artist in SAMA’s collection, including a major glass installation commissioned for the Museum’s 1981 opening, offering deeper understanding of Bell’s practice.

Frieda Toranzo Jaeger (Mexican, born 1988), Surrender to the Machine Abstraction a Form of Liberation, 2025, Oil on canvas, hand embroidery, and metal, 167 × 139 in. (424.2 × 353.1 cm), San Antonio Museum of Art, purchased with The Brown Foundation Contemporary Art Acquisition Fund, 2025.9 © Frieda Toranzo Jaeger. Image courtesy of the artist and Bortolami, New York. Photography by Guang Xu.

Frieda Toranzo Jaeger is celebrated for a distinct approach to painting that interweaves diverse artistic and cultural histories, including Indigenous embroidery traditions, Northern Renaissance religious altars, and Mexican muralism. Her large-scale polyptychs defy the boundaries between paintings and sculpture. Surrender to the Machine Abstraction a Form of Liberation is the third largest polyptych the artist has created to date. Across her body of work, Toranzo Jaeger examines the relationship between humanity and the machine—which is symbolic of efficiency, productivity, and profit. The intersections of systems of production, political ideologies, and social values become manifest in this painting as a monumental crimson heart constructed of a network that evokes cogs and wires, rather than veins and arteries. The heart—which can connote love, passion, desire, and life itself—is pierced by a column in the gallery and appears to buckle under its own weight. This work will go on view in May 2026. 

José Júlio Calasans Neto (Brazilian, 1932–2006), Itapuã Céu, 1976, Portfolio of ten woodcut prints, Portfolio: 19 × 13 1/2 × 1/2 in. (48.3 × 34.3 × 1.3 cm); Sheet: 17 7/8 × 12 7/16 in. (45.4 × 31.6 cm), each, San Antonio Museum of Art, bequest of Alexander Sleght, 2025.2.1.1-10 © The Estate of José Júlio Calasans Neto

José Júlio Calasans Neto (Brazilian, 1932–2006), Itapuã Mar, 1974, Portfolio of seven woodcut prints, Portfolio: 19 × 14 × 1/2 in. (48.3 × 35.6 × 1.3 cm); Sheet: 12 3/4 × 18 5/16 in. (32.4 × 46.5 cm), each, San Antonio Museum of Art, bequest of Alexander Sleght, 2025.2.2.1-7 © The Estate of José Júlio Calasans Neto

José Júlio Calasans Neto was a Brazilian artist who worked in printmaking, illustration, carving, and painting. He is widely known as an advocate for arts and cultural spaces in his native port city of Salvador in the state of Bahia. Salvador is an important center for Candomblé, an Afro-Brazilian religion that developed during the nineteenth century. The ritual landscapes surrounding Salvador are the subject of these two woodcut portfolios by Calasans Neto. Itapuã Mar and Itapuã Ceu respectively reference the sea and the sky of Itapuã, a now-former fishing village located just outside of Salvador. The portfolios join a significant collection of works on paper by Latin American artists of the twentieth century, expanding its geographical reach. 

César Rangel Ramos (Mexican, born 1977), Señora Lapislázuli 1, 2025, Albigraphy (water, quartz, sandpaper friction, and plant binder of cactus and seeds on black polymethylmethacrylate), 97 1/4 × 72 13/16 in. (247 × 184.9 cm), San Antonio Museum of Art, purchased with the June Ledlow His Endowment, 2025.8 © César Rangel Ramos. Image courtesy of the artist and Galería Karen Huber. Photography by Ramiro Chaves.

César Rangel Ramos’s work is deeply engaged with the histories of philosophy and theology. It is often produced in a mode that the artist describes as “mythopoetic,” with images speaking to cosmic creating and mapping and an expansive theological iconography integrating Catholicism, Mesoamerican religious traditions, and ancient Greco-Roman ideas. In technical terms, his innovation is to create two-dimensional pictorial images using “albigraphy,” a working mode he developed in 2016. The artist rubs wet sandpaper and other abrasives on a plexiglass support. The friction produces dust that pools in his intended composition and is then fixed in place with a gum binder. The title of Señora Lapislázuli 1 refers to a hybrid image resonant across traditions. As Rangel Ramos notes, the blue mineral pigment lapis lazuli was traditionally used to paint the mantle of the Virgin Mary by medieval artists. In that garment’s folds and creases, Rangel Ramos recognizes the echo of the snake skirt, a costume worn by Aztec female deities, and resonance with labyrinths in Greco-Roman tradition. 

Chest, 18th century, Cuzco, Peru, Embossed leather on wood with iron fittings, 8 1/4 × 15 × 11 3/4 in. (21 × 38.1 × 29.8 cm), San Antonio Museum of Art, gift of "My Exotic Nana," Lydia Toulmin Pickell, from her granddaughter Laura Butterfield, 2025.13

This chest from colonial-era Cuzco in Peru is outfitted with tooled and stitched leather and iron fittings, including a lock. Trunks such as this were frequently part of the furniture for the feminine domestic space known as the estrado, a room dedicated to women’s recreation and socializing in homes of the Viceroyalty. 

School of Diego Quispe Tito, Inmaculada with Joachim and Anna, 18th century, Cuzco, Peru, Oil on canvas, 47 × 36 in. (119.4 × 91.4 cm), San Antonio Museum of Art, gift of a friend of the Museum, 2025.6

This work is a fine example of painting from Cuzco in the eighteenth century, a major period in the history of Colonial Latin American art when painters in regional centers undertook an intensive program of creating images representing Marian devotion and other religious subjects. In the seventeenth century, Cuzco became the center of a painting style with influences from the contribution of Indigenous makers and from European traditions ranging from the Italian Baroque to Flemish landscape painting. The painting is attributed to a follower of Diego Quispe Tito, among the best-known artists within the Cuzco School. It depicts Mary standing atop a crescent moon as beams of sunlight shine behind her, underscoring her birth as a religious and cosmological miracle. She is surrounded by cherubs, as two angels lower a crown onto her head, and her parents, Anna and Joachim, are positioned at her sides. 

Santo Niño de Atocha, 19th century, Mexico, Wood, pigment, glass, Approx. 11 in., San Antonio Museum of Art, San Antonio Museum of Art, anonymous gift, 2025.7

This polychromed wood sculpture is an example of a nineteenth-century santo from Mexico. Santos, also referred to as bultos, are religious artworks depicting Christ and other icons. The sculpture depicts the Santo Niño de Atocha, a devotion to the Christ Child whose origins can be traced back to thirteenth-century Spain. According to hagiographical tradition, the Santo Niño first appeared when a Moorish army conquered the town of Atocha; dressed in pilgrim’s clothing, he brought bread and water to Christian prisoners. Images of the Santo Niño traveled to the Americas with the Spanish. Over time, devotion spread into the US-Mexico borderlands. Important shrines and pilgrimage sites dedicated to the Santo Niño were created in New Mexico, California, and Texas. He is revered for protecting travelers, migrants, bandits, and the unjustly imprisoned.

Cup (glaux) with a youth holding a cup, Greek (Attic), ca. 460-450 B.C., Terracotta (red-figure technique), h. 3 1/16 in. (7.8 cm); w. 6 1/2 in. (16.5 cm); d. 4 1/8 in. (10.5 cm), San Antonio Museum of Art, gift of Curtis Brown, 2025.4

This cup for drinking wine is a glaux, a shape that SAMA hadn’t previously possessed in its extensive holdings of Athenian red-figure pottery. It adds an example typical of the smaller vases produced by Athenian workshops in the fifth century BC. On one side is a nude youth holding a cup similar in shape to the glaux itself, and on the other is Eros, the god of love, playing a double flute.   

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Thumbnail Image Credit: Frieda Toranzo Jaeger (Mexican, born 1988), Surrender to the Machine Abstraction a Form of Liberation, 2025, Oil on canvas, hand embroidery, and metal, 167 × 139 in. (424.2 × 353.1 cm), San Antonio Museum of Art, purchased with The Brown Foundation Contemporary Art Acquisition Fund, 2025.9 © Frieda Toranzo Jaeger. Image courtesy of the artist and Bortolami, New York. Photography by Guang Xu.