San Antonio has a hometown reason to smile at the McNay Art Museum this season. Collection Conversations: Cruz Ortiz and the Modern Portrait, on view in the Zoch Gallery from August 19, 2026, through March 14, 2027, places paintings by San Antonio-based artist Cruz Ortiz right alongside some of the museum’s most treasured modern portraits.
Ortiz, born in 1972, first turned to easel painting as a way of documenting stories rooted in art history. Inspired by nineteenth-century French modernism, punk rock energy and the Chicano experience in Texas, he brings a proudly local, contemporary voice to portraiture. His recent canvases in the show include Listening to Monk in the Verano from 2025, La Rosie Castro from 2019 and Olivia Doing an Art Historical Pose During the Pandemic from 2020.
Those new works hold their own in remarkable company. Nearby hang William Merritt Chase’s Portrait of Alice Dieudonnée Chase from 1899 and Henri Matisse’s Nu au Coussin Bleu (Nude with Blue Cushion) from 1924, echoing the artists Ortiz himself studied on visits to the McNay — among them Diego Rivera, Alice Neel and Pablo Picasso. The conversation across generations invites visitors to rethink what a portrait can do and how it keeps evolving.
Organized by Elizabeth Kathleen Mitchell, Head of Curatorial Affairs and Curator of Prints and Drawings, with Mia Lopez, Curator of Latinx Art, the exhibition at 6000 N. New Braunfels Avenue is a joyful celebration of a San Antonio artist telling present-day stories in a medium that connects him — and all of us — to the past.
Photo: McNay Art Museum
