SAN ANTONIO – The prickly plant familiar to many throughout the Southwest is the new face of the Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center.
The art installation, which is 900 feet long and 18 feet tall, is titled “Cactus.”
Artist Christin Moeller, who lives in Los Angeles but is from Frankfurt, Germany, is the brains behind the billboard-style project.
“I might be wrong, but if I think about a plant I might want to plant in San Antonio, I think it better be drought-resistant,” Moeller said. “And among plants that are native to the land, what could be more beautiful than a field of prickly pear cacti?”
The city of San Antonio set aside $3 million for art needs. One-third of that is being used to fund art projects in and around the convention center expansion.
Passersby will notice a fluid image of cacti in a field. But up close, the project becomes more transparent in its design.
“It’s basically a chain-link fence,” said the city’s public art manager, Jimmy LeFlore. “It’s low-tech and high-tech at the same time and uses this chain-link fence as kind of a canvas, as you would say, and inside the chain link, like you may see in neighborhoods and yards where they put plastic cups inside. These are plastic vinyl inserts that are basically like pixels on a screen and the pixels create the image from a distance.”
About 100,000 of those vinyl “pixels” create the overall image. Behind the chain-link fence is a green wall, which helps contrast the lighter-colored inserts.
LeFlore said the installation was made with robotic machines inserting the vinyl pieces. It was then rolled up and shipped to San Antonio, where construction crews unwound the spool to hang in place.
Why decorate with plants?
“Until the end of the 19th century, floral- and plant-inspired motifs were common decorative elements in architecture,” Moeller said. “We find them carved into the ancient Greek Corinthian columns or used as wallpaper patterns during the Art Nouveau period. It made sense to me to do a piece in this tradition as the proportion of the given ‘canvas area’ on the new convention center.”
LeFlore said public art in the city isn’t a flavor-of-the-month thing anymore, with the addition of several new pieces by six local artists at the new Yanaguana Garden in Hemisfair Park, future Hemisfair projects, the convention center, and art along the San Antonio River and the San Pedro Creek improvements.
“Cactus” is a larger-than-life figure that seems sure to fit in with the rest of San Antonio’s storied past, alongside iconic San Antonio architecture like the Tower of the Americas and the Alamo.
“This has been a real resurgence, I think, for artists in our community to be looking at such a popular public art program,” LeFlore said.
The Department of Culture and Creative Development has a number of activities for the public through the Public Art San Antonio program, including a map tour. All current projects and those within the last 20 years are clickable so people can walk to them.
Watch the video above for a look at the new art installation on the convention center.