Join us on First Friday for a pop up studio sale with our 2025–2026 Berlin Resident Artists! Participating artists Brandy González, Anthony Rundblade, and Andrea Willems will have select artwork for sale to raise additional funds to support their residency stay in Berlin. All of the proceeds will directly benefit the artists.

+ The studio sale will take place in our Education Space, located directly between our main gallery entrance and Slab Cinema.

Fair dates and times
Friday, April 4, 2025,  6pm-9pm
Saturday, April 5, 2025,  12pm-4pm
Free Admission

Contemporary at Blue Star is pleased to announce the return of the Novel Ideas Art Book Fair. Established in 2020 Novel Ideas is aimed at highlighting and connecting the amazing artists in our region and beyond who utilize books and print based materials as their medium and share their work. Also included are publishers and presses producing artists’ books, monographs and related publications.  Novel Ideas features artists’ books, monographs, zines, printed ephemera, and more.

The fair will happen in the Contemporary’s Education Space, right next-door to our exhibition galleries.

 

Join the Contemporary for a new installment of “Taco Talk” an exhibition program and curator walk-through with coffee and breakfast tacos. Learn more about the work in Mosh Now, Cry Later  and Alyssa Danna’s Tantalizing Middle Part. Visitors will have the opportunity to ask questions and engage with the artists in the exhibitions.

Registration is required for this free program (link below).

Would you like to support exhibition programs like these? Consider donating $5 with your registration!

The Contemporary welcomes visitors for breakfast tacos and a gallery walk-through with exhibiting artist Sizhu Li. Learn more about Moonment, an ongoing installation project inspired by the Chinese ancient poem “海上生明月，天涯共此时” by Tang poet Zhang Jiuling. Moonment is a site-specific installation that will be on view in the Contemporary’s main gallery.

This event is free and open to everyone with registration (link below).

The Contemporary is excited to welcome visitors to a reception of In Our Own Worlds, a special MOSAIC Student Artist exhibition on view in our inaugural Red Dot Shop.

In Our Own Worlds is a collection of artworks created by the Contemporary’s MOSAIC Student Artists. Working alongside visiting artist Kat Cadena, students reflected on the concept of voice to discuss topics such as human rights and home. The painting workshop encouraged students to research and create their own mini murals on wood panels with alternatively shaped surfaces and textures, providing students a chance to practice problem solving as a muralist.

About the Artists:

River Castillo studies plants, animals, and the way nature coexists with people. They take every opportunity to create art and be a voice for the environment.

Taylor Montemayor is a native San Antonian who took an interest in art at the age of three. She has since been dedicated to sharpening her artistic skills to effectively express her voice and tell her story.

Oscar Magaña is an aspiring illustrator that expresses his personality through silly and original characters. His work is often playful with the goal of cultivating joy and happiness in the world, reconnecting viewers with their inner child.

Join the Contemporary for breakfast tacos and a gallery walk-through with our Red Dot Artist Honoree, Mark Hogensen. The walk-through will focus on Hogensen’s career-spanning presentation of work titled Spatial Geographies, included in the Red Dot Show, and dive into his work and process. This event is free with registration and open to everyone. 
 
About the Exhibition 
The Red Dot Show is an annual survey exhibition of San Antonio-based artists contributing their work to Red Dot in support of the Contemporary. It features more than 100 artworks exhibited throughout all four of the Contemporary’s galleries. 
 

Contemporary at Blue Star invites the public to the opening of our three new exhibitions: The C&’s Center of Unfinished Business, Kaysaypac: Portraits and Figures by Leeanna Chipana, and Cheng Xinhao’s Silver…and Other Elements. The Contemporary is always free and open to the public.

The C&s Center of Unfinished Business

Contemporary is thrilled to partner with C&, a multimedia platform for contemporary visual arts, to present The Center of Unfinished Business, a reading room that encapsulates an array of books that explore the persistence of colonialism in various ways, from its origins to how it effects people and places today. You’ll find texts on the way land and culture have been forcibly stripped from native people due to colonialism alongside texts that explore how empire-building also connects to fashion, 21^st century capitalism, and more.

Kaysaypac: Portraits and Figures by Leeanna Chipana

Born in Long Island, New York to an immigrant Quechuan-Peruvian father and American mother, Leeanna Chipana draws from her Quechuan and American identity by incorporating Incan, Aztec, and Mayan iconography with classical European oil painting techniques and approaches. The blending and blurring of indigenous figures and Western techniques is an effort of disrupting colonial erasure by placing Indigenous-Latinx figures at the forefront of a very Euro-centric style of painting.

Cheng Xinhao
Silver…and Other Elements

In this four-channel film, Cheng Xinhao investigates the Mang people’s (the indigenous people living at the border of Vietnam and China) adaptation to shifting borders and changing systems. To explore this moving borderline and the migration of its people, Xinhao follows the fluctuating use of currency.

+ Register Here

 

Join the Contemporary and the curators of  Xicanx: Dreamers + Changemakers | Soñadores y creadores del cambio, Jill Baird + Greta de León, for an exhibition walkthrough.

The artists in Xicanx, as the title suggests, are dreamers and changemakers. Of Mexican-American origin, they self-identify as Xicanx, a term that crosses national borders and gender lines to encompass the Chicano people’s multi-generational experiences of social difference. These artists are part of a rich tradition of combining visual art and activism. Xicanx was originally presented by the Museum of Anthropology (MOA) in Canada, and The Americas Research Network (ARENET).

Breakfast tacos and coffee will be provided. This event is free and open to the public.

Contemporary at Blue Star invites the public to the opening of Xicanx: Dreamers + Changemakers | Soñadores + creadores del cambio. Of Mexican-American origin, they self-identify as Xicanx, a term that crosses national borders and gender lines to encompass the Chicano people’s multi-generational experiences of social difference.

Opening night will include a performance by exhibiting artist Roberto Gonzalez at 8pm.

+ Free and open to the public

+ Register here

Join us for breakfast tacos and an artist-led walkthrough with exhibiting artists, Michael Guerra Foerster and the CAM Perennial curator and artists! Learn more about the artwork, process, and the significance behind the work.

In partnership with Contemporary Art Month, Contemporary at Blue Star will host the 2024 CAM Perennial exhibition, Vernacular Systems, curated by Christopher Blay. Vernacular Systems highlights themes of interconnectivity from personal and globalized perspectives. The artists reflect on the human nature to connect to the world around us–from nature, to family, to work, and the day to day. They also critique histories and systems which thrive on disconnection yet resolve in knowing that even when connection is not visible, there exists networks of systems linking humanity, roots that may unify. Vernacular Systems features San Antonio and Houston artists: Ricky Armendariz, Nela Garzón, Jennifer Battaglia, Juan Carlos Escobedo, Preston Gaines, Raul Rene Gonzalez, Mark Anthony Martinez, Shavon Morris, Marc Newsome, Alán Serna, Monique Sullivan, and Zulma Vega.

 

Michael Guerra Foerster’s solo exhibition, Without a Trace, investigates connection, and touches on ideas of materialism, and the ephemeral. In large part a reaction to capitalistic structures that surround the art world, Foerster freely gifts his work in the hopes of creating genuine connections between the artwork, viewer, and artist. In his exhibition at the Contemporary, Foerster creates an exercise in loss and letting go by creating an interactive installation which will involve the viewer destroying unfired clay sculptures to find a token to carry home.