San Antonio Museum of Art Presents Maya Blue: Ancient Color, New Visions
May 06 – May 06, 2025
May 06 – May 06, 2025
On view starting May 10, 2025
San Antonio, TX—May 6, 2025—The San Antonio Museum of Art (SAMA) presents Maya Blue: Ancient Color, New Visions, a new exhibition that focuses on a pigment that was highly prized by Maya artists of the first millennium AD and its enduring meanings for artists and communities in our own time.
Curated by Kristopher Driggers, Associate Curator of Latin American Art, Maya Blue will be on view in the Golden Gallery from May 10, 2025, through May 10, 2026.
For the ancient artists who used this paint, Maya Blue was vibrant and rich in symbolism, evoking vital water, breath, and abundance. It was most often applied to works intended for offering and other ritual contexts. While it was a valued material for makers before the sixteenth-century colonization of the Americas, Maya Blue’s ideological importance has not been forgotten. For makers working today, the meanings of the color and the pigment itself remain rich sources of artistic inspiration, becoming a site for thinking critically and creatively about issues like memory, identity, and wellness and the body.
Exploring these connections across time—and celebrating the Indigenous innovation of colors—the exhibition features works of ancient Maya art, including ceramic figures and plaster sculptures adorned with Maya Blue as well as adornments carved in greenstone, which shares in Maya Blue’s symbolism. Many of these works will be on view at SAMA for the first time, including recent gifts from the collections of John and Kathi Oppenheimer and Candace P. and W. Michael Humphreys. In dialogue with these ancient artworks, images by Guatemalan Modernist Carlos Mérida consider Indigenous identities in the twentieth century, and works by Rolando Briseño, Clarissa Tossin, and Sandy Rodríguez engage and utilize Maya Blue as a concept and material for critique and reflection.
“Many of us are accustomed to thinking about colors as consumer goods that can be easily purchased. But in ancient Maya culture, blue pigment was something difficult to make and source—more rare, marvelous, and saturated with meaning. No less wondrous, Maya Blue remains vibrant for artists working today whose works are featured in the exhibition. Indigenous knowledge and innovations have enduring resonances, and these artworks allow us to see conversations about identity, community, and history unfold across time,” said Driggers.
Public programming for Maya Blue: Ancient Color, New Visions will include a Member Mixer on Saturday, June 21, and a lecture titled Seeing Mesoamerican Color by Driggers on Tuesday, August 12. Additional events will be announced throughout the run of the exhibition.
Learn more at https://www.samuseum.org/artwork/exhibition/maya-blue-ancient-color-new-visions/
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San Antonio Museum of Art:
The San Antonio Museum of Art serves as a forum to explore and connect with art that spans the world’s geographies, artistic periods, genres, and cultures. Its collection contains more than 30,000 works representing 5,000 years of history. Housed in the historic Lone Star Brewery on the Museum Reach of San Antonio’s River Walk, the San Antonio Museum of Art is committed to promoting the rich cultural heritage and life of the city.
For more information, visit samuseum.org.
Visitor Information:
Maya Blue: Ancient Color, New Visions is included with Museum admission.
Media:
For interviews, digital images, or additional information, please contact: Adriana Gómez del Campo, PR & Digital Communications Manager | 210.978.8113 | adriana.gomezdelcampo@samuseum.org
