Most museum goers won’t be familiar with Michael Tracy unless they were similarly engaged with contemporary art, particularly in Texas, in the 1970s, when Tracy was a rising star.
By Chadd Scott
“Michael Tracy: The Elegy of Distance” at the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio shares more than the artist’s work, it shares his world.
San Ygnacio, TX, where Tracy (1943-2024) lived and located his studio beginning in 1978. The Texas-Mexico borderlands. Mexico City, where he also had a studio, spending a great deal of time there beginning in the 1970s. India, where he traveled regularly for two decades, making jewelry.
“It’s very much an environmental experience,” exhibition curator René Paul Barilleaux told Forbes.com about the presentation. “It’s a complete immersion into a world that he conceived.”
Sights, sounds, and smells converge across six galleries. Yes, smells. The exhibition features bespoke aromas.
“It was always going to be an incense scent,” Barilleaux remembers. “We had discussions about whether it’s the kind of incense used in Roman Catholic ritual, a kind of frankincense incense, or if it (was) going to be incense like you find in India. In the end, we decided to focus on the scent you would smell in India. It has a more floral scent to it, and it’s pumped out of a little diffuser that’s in the gallery that wafts into the air.”
Barilleaux began working with Tracy on the exhibition in late 2023 all the way through the artist’s death in June 2024. “The Elegy of Distance” marks the final presentation of his work Tracy was directly involved with. As such, the show takes on his personality in a way posthumous exhibitions typically can’t.
“He was certainly strong willed and had very specific opinions about everything, but that was helpful because we came to understand what he wanted out of this project, the kind of imagery he wanted to show, the mood he wanted to set,” Barilleaux said of the notoriously cantankerous artist. “His personality was really helpful to me in formulating what this show would look like.”
And sound like.
The exhibition features an original soundscape by musical composer Omar Zubair, who Tracy was acquainted with.
“(Zubair) created five different soundscapes that alternate through the space. As you move through (the exhibition), you hear different kinds of sounds,” Barilleaux explained. “Sometimes nature. Sometimes more like a ritual sound. Sometimes it’s the sound of bells chiming, all these different kind of sound experiences, sometimes it’s just silence.”
A moody, darkened, meditative gallery recalls a chapel.
Tracy was raised Roman Catholic in the midcentury with all its attendant repression. Even more so for Tracy, who was gay. His artwork is flush with references to the church.
“Even from the beginning, he was borrowing from the kind of theater and pageantry of Catholic ritual,” Barilleaux said. “Things like processionals, the various kinds of sacred objects, he was fascinated by all of that, so he incorporated that into his work. Drawing on liturgical vestments, garments, he even designed liturgical vestments, all of that theater you find in Catholicism, he was drawn to that.”
Art history as well. As perfectly stated by Texas-centric arts publication Glasstire, “(Tracy) incorporated the dramatic sensuality of European baroque painting and the vivid pageantry of Catholic ritual.”
This particular elongated gallery has benches on either side for visitors to sit, recalling pews.
“Michael designed furniture, designed jewelry, and did a lot of other projects that helped sustain him over the years when he was not selling his paintings so rapidly; we wanted to bring that into the show,” Barilleaux said. “That was one of the other things about Michael’s process, he worked with a lot of crafts people who would make things to compliment what he was working on and to incorporate in his environments.”
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Image:
“Michael Tracy: The Elegy of Distance” installation view at McNay Art Museum in San Antonio. Courtesy of McNay Art Museum, photo by Jacklyn Velez.
