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The Tejano Conjunto Festival is coming in May, and organizers have reached out to the artist community for ideas on its new poster design.
“We invite the public, both experienced artists and emerging artists and students, to enter their interpretations of conjunto to music to our poster contest," explained Cristina Balli, executive director of the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center. "We have a winner that is selected among all the categories, and that winner earns $2,000.”
But the grand prize winner's creativity isn't the only one honored. “We do have various categories for participants to enter,” she added. “We have an open category, and then student categories, which is college, high school and middle school, and we do have a winning entry for each of those categories with a small cash prize.”
Balli said that for the festival's 43 years, the poster contest has gathered a kind of aura about it. Taken together, the results of the competitions can illustrate the many ways that artists through the years have expressed their love of music and South Texas culture The winning artwork often becomes a part of the festival's lore.
“It'll be used to print the posters of the festival, and these become commemorative pieces that people collect. And most satisfying of all, I think, is that we use this image to print on the T-shirts of the festival every year," Balli said. “And those become collector’s items, and people really love those T-shirts.”
Balli said the style and the subject matter of the posters vary wildly. “We see spiritual images like the Virgin Mary, or even aliens or mythological figures like the chupacabras. We see images of the City of San Antonio. So there's a wide variety of ways that conjunto music and conjunto music culture can be interpreted. And the possibilities are endless,” she said.
Feb. 12 is the deadline to get your entry in. “We do have all the instructions on how to submit an entry on our website, and that is at Guadalupeculturalarts.org. We encourage everybody to read those carefully,” Balli said. “There are some specific instructions. For example, the image must say, ‘Tejano Conjunto Festival in San Antonio.’”
She said entries can be emailed, or physical prints or paintings can be brought by the Guadalupe Latino bookstore at 1300 Guadalupe Street. Any questions can be directed to their office at 210-571-3151.