More than a Distant Memory: Michael Tracy at the McNay

Nancy Zastudil·
San AntonioVisual Art
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The internet is peppered with a handful of articles about the artist Michael Tracy, the majority of which take either his extravagant but gruff personality or his 2024 passing as their subject matter. Whether it’s the New York Times site visits, Artforum’s emotive review, or the Houston Chronicle’s report of “death, conflict, extinction, disaster,” these stories will tell you almost everything you, dear reader, need to know.

Almost.

Michael Tracy: The Elegy of Distance, on view through July 27 at the McNay Art Museum, offers an opportunity for a direct, personal, and powerful experience with the late artist’s works.

But why exactly is the San Antonio museum championing this artist who was “exiled” from Houston?

For starters, Matthew McLendon, Director and CEO of the McNay, tells me that the McNay presented Tracy’s first museum exhibition in 1971, which speaks to the museum’s heritage of championing emerging, marginalized artists. That kind of support is reflected by the current exhibition as well.

“He took himself to San Ygnacio [Texas] and in some ways turned his back on the larger commercial art world,” says McLendon, referring to Tracy’s move to the small border town in 1978. “We feel honored to be entrusted with bringing his work back to the forefront and to a wider audience, including new generations of museum goers. It’s an opportunity to bring Michael and his work back into a larger cultural conversation.”

What took place between these book-ending exhibitions is the stuff of legacy and legend, to which the dynamic nature of The Elegy of Distance alludes, at least in part.

After more than a decade of living in San Ygnacio, Tracy founded the River Pierce Foundation in 1990, welcoming artists from different cultures to immerse themselves into the local environment as Tracy did. Christopher Rincón, Director of the River Pierce Foundation and President of the Michael Tracy Foundation, says that River Pierce was a resource center during the 20-year period that the artist worked on the art in The Elegy of Distance. Essentially, the exhibition would not have been possible without the archival nature of the organization’s work, or guidance from the artist himself.

The foundation’s inaugural event that year was “a procession, a performative action based on the annual Via Crucis (Way of the Cross) liturgy practiced in San Ygnacio for hundreds of years,” Rincón explains. Other contemporary artists were commissioned to set up interventions along the route. “The final stop involved the burning of Tracy’s piece Cruz: La Pasión as it was floated into the Rio Grande and it became a beacon of destruction and transformation in protest to the problems of immigration that we still deal with today.”

This kind of sacrifice was nothing new to Tracy. According to the Houston Chronicle Tracy, while living in Galveston, attracted attention for Sacrifice I, 9.13.74 (The Sugar), a performance in which he “sacrificed one of his favorite paintings upon a wood altar set in front of a giant white pyramid at the Imperial Sugar Co. warehouse.”

While The Elegy of Distance doesn’t include performance per say, the installation is nothing short of dramatic—rightfully so, considering Tracy’s interests, artmaking sensibilities, and the influences of religion, spirituality, and Catholicism on his work. Large-scale sculptures and assemblage reference altars and stations of the cross while heavy impasto abstract paintings offer up fleshy textures that bring to mind the messiness of life. Brightly colored walls of red and yellow immerse museum visitors into a setting that sparks feelings of both celebration and alarm.

“Because the work is largely abstract, and the titling of the work is often quite evocative, viewers are transported to different worlds, whether it be to India, to Mexico, or to different planes of consciousness, because that was something Michael was very interested in,” says McLendon. “Also, Michael was really a great colorist—he understood color in a profound and sophisticated way, and many of these canvases are riots of color. He pushes the boundaries of accepted notions of what beauty is, and that’s exciting.” Additionally, the exhibition features an original soundscape from Omar Zubair, whom Tracy had commissioned to produce a soundtrack for the Trevino-Uribe Rancho, now a National Historic Landmark owned by the River Pierce Foundation and open to the public.

In our correspondence, Rincón reminisced about Tracy’s unique take on life as an artist, which on more than one occasion included a drink in one hand and a bucket of paint or cigarette in the other, saying that Tracy often spoke of “turning off the self-editing mechanism in his brain.”

Rincón remembers, as a twenty year old, asking Tracy how he “did it.” “He chuckled because he knew I was asking a very complicated question but he knew the right response. He told me, ‘Just keep making your work. Don’t ever stop.’

—NANCY ZASTUDIL

Nancy Zastudil

Nancy Zastudil is an editor and curator working toward equitable representation in and access to the arts.