The career of San Antonio artist Rolando Briseño spans more than five decades.
His works are featured in major museum collections in Brooklyn and Washington D.C., and his public art is on display from Texas to New York.
Seventy-five of Briseños works are now at the center of his first retrospective, Dining with Rolando Briseño: A 50 Year Retrospective at San Antonio’s Centro de Artes Gallery.
The retrospective explores the food traditions of the Mexican American table. Drawings, paintings, and lithographs incorporate materials like tablecloths and ingredients like mole, chiles, and tortillas.
Briseño's “tablescape” artworks blend food, culture, and quantum mechanics directly onto tablecloths.
“The table is my symbol. It's like a locus of community or a secular ceremonial center,” he said. “It’s what I missed when I entered regular American culture.”
The Moctezuma section of the gallery examines artworks that contain Aztec and Mesoamerican influences.
The First Course of an Aztec Banquet features two enlarged images drawn from centuries old codices while light- and dark-skinned ancient and modern female hands exchange a cigar and a smoking stick.
Briseño explains the first course of Aztec banquets preceded the consuming of foods.
“This one (emphasizes) the sophistication of Mexican food in the Aztec empire,” he said. “The first course was smelling flowers and exchanging the smoking tubes. So, I thought that was pretty sophisticated.”
Dining with Rolando Briseño: A 50 Year Retrospective is on display at Centro de Artes Gallery in downtown San Antonio through Feb. 9.
Briseño’s tablescape-inspired artworks are also paired with the words of poets, writers, scholars and artists in the volume, Moctezuma’s Table: Rolando Briseño’s Mexican and Chicano Tablescapes.
Briseño also partnered with the San Antonio Department of Arts & Culture to produce a four-episode video series on food, culture, and art.
View the video on tacos with taco poet and San Antonio Poet Laureate Eddie Vega below:
