Art on the Horizon: Exploring the Cultural Landscape of Corpus Christi

Tarra Gaines·
Corpus ChristiTravelVisual Art
·

Like Texas wildflowers, art blooms everywhere in the Lone Star state. Yet I must confess, I do most of my art exploration in our larger cities. So when Visit Corpus Christi invited me to discover some seaside, or in this case, Gulf-side art during their monthly Downtown Art Walk celebration, I answered that siren call.

Staying as a guest at the Omni Hotel downtown and right across the street from the Corpus Christi seawall made for optimal convenience when walking to major and sometimes hidden art treats. Perhaps my biggest surprise of the trip was how much art the city has concentrated within a few square miles inside downtown.

I arrived a few days before the first Friday Art Walk to take my own preview walk through some Corpus Christi art hotspots with guidance from Visit Corpus and local tour company, Enjoy Corpus Christi Tours.

One of the art institutions on my must-see list was the Art Museum of South Texas. Arts and Culture has covered several of their special exhibitions in the past, but this was the first chance I had to view their permanent collection. Situated right on the downtown seawall, the building itself is a work of art. The stark white concrete and shell aggregate of the original Philip Johnson designed building and the rooftop copper pyramids and bold splashes of color of Mexican architect Ricardo Legorreta’s design for the 2006 expansion create a stunning juxtaposition on the horizon where sky meets sea. Inside, large windows throughout the galleries allow visitors to see art in constant sea reflected light. Yes, I spotted dolphins through those windows.

During my visit, they were installing the fall exhibition Target Texas: Studio Practice, on view through January 26, 2025. This latest show in a Biennial group exhibition series highlights the studio practice of Texas artists. I only got a sneak peek, but the diversity in mediums and artist locals (Houston, Waco, San Antonio, Corpus, Rockport) made for an art enticement to come back to Corpus soon.

The exhibitions Adjacency: In and Between from the Permanent Collection and Last XV Years Acquisitions of Art for the Collection gave me a nice feel for the permanent collection, especially its focus on Modern and Contemporary American and Texas art. AMST has one of the largest Dorothy Hood collections in the nation and has organized some outstanding exhibitions around her work. A few pieces were on view. Their permanent Dr. Clotilde P. Garcia Spanish Colonial Gallery also presents another layer to the collection with the gallery’s focus on art of the Pre-Columbian and the Spanish Colonial period in Central America, Mexico, and the Southwestern United States and much of South America.

Just steps away from the museum is the American Bank Center which houses the city’s convention center and two performance venues that host everything from music concerts to comedy to the Corpus Christi Broadway series. I realized as the resident Arts and Culture Texas Broadway cartographer, I might have been remiss in not including the Mean Girls, Book of Mormon and Pretty Woman Corpus Christi stops in my last survey.

While I didn’t have time to catch a show at the Center, I lingered outdoors for a kind of art treasure hunt with award winning Texas artist, Mel Chin’s installation Untitled Histories. Commissioned by the American Bank Center, Chin’s work is a “sculpture in five parts”. Each piece is presented as a seemingly broken limestone sculpture, representing a fragment of forgotten Texas Gulf Coast history. The installation includes a dog and a pair of human feet of the nomadic Karankawa Indians, the dress of a 1820s Irish immigrant, a 16th century Spanish gauntlet, the torso fragment of an African American cowboy and the helmet of a 1930s oil field worker. Scattered around the Center, it took me about 15 minutes to find them all. The hunt sent me searching, literally and figuratively, for the real Texas stories I never learned in high school history class.

About a 30 minute walk down the seawall promenade (or a five minute drive on North Shoreline Blvd.) more art abounds in the Corpus Christi Art Center. Once the USO during World War II, then the county tax office, the building was set to be demolished in the 80s before the community art center organization took it over. The building now houses multiple art studios, art classes, galleries, an artist owned shop and is home to a small but hardy local farmers market on Wednesdays. I visited a day before the Art Walk amid the hustle and bustle of new shows being installed in the galleries.

A few blocks away, in the heart of  downtown is another must-see spot for visual art lovers, K Space Contemporary. Housed inside the century-old former Kress Five & Dime building, the upstairs consists of the K Space Art Studios, and its working space for area artists, while the separate but connected nonprofit K Space Contemporary takes up the ground floor. Along with plenty of educational programs, and a fabulous shop filled with local artist created paintings, jewelry, prints and accessories, K Space mounts approximately 20 solo and group exhibitions each year. Just in time for Art Walk, they opened the group show Seeding Soil as part of the 2024 Texas Biennial. The Soil artists were all exploring themes of land, history and memory.

K Space holds a strong art presence downtown not just for its exhibitions, but also for its educational outreach, especially its annual summer Mural Arts Program for teens. The vibrant results of that program have brought colorful painted stories to downtown in the form of small and large murals depicting everything from whimsical mermaid cats to Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo doing their laundry to local, historical Tejano music icons. Those K Space presented murals join a sea of other large scale murals throughout the downtown area designed by national and local artists. The city’s annual Mural Fest keeps those mural creations coming. In a few years, it might be hard to find a downtown wall without a mural.

When the evening of Art Walk finally arrived, and residents and visitors poured into the cordoned-off streets, I was glad for all my preview wandering. All the art organizations I had visited participated in the celebration with cultural and educational programming and with the opening of all those exhibitions I saw being installed. Restaurants and bars set up outdoor stages for live music, pop-up arts and crafts stands lined the blocks, food trucks abound and it felt like the whole city had come out for an art party. Wandering through it all, I marveled most at the fact that in a month’s time Corpus Christi would do it all over again. That’s some commitment to celebrating art!

—TARRA GAINES

Tarra Gaines

Tarra Gaines is a writer and teacher in Houston.