Humanscape #57
Artist:
Mel Casas
(American, 1929 - 2014)
Place made:United States
Date: 1969
Medium: Acrylic on canvas
Dimensions:
73 x 76 3/4 in. (185.4 x 194.9 cm)
Credit Line: Purchased with funds provided by the John and Karen McFarlin Fund
Object number: 90.76.2
Copyright: © Mel Casas
Label Text
Mel Casas’s Humanscape #57 is a mashup: part landscape, part pop art, part scientific diagram. Casas paints a rolling field of Texas bluebonnets, perhaps referencing the nineteenth-century landscape paintings of Julian Onderdonk (on view on the third floor). Superimposed on the sky is a floating anatomy diagram of a bluebonnet. “TEXANA” is stamped below the landscape, denoting the history and culture of Texas (as in, “Americana”), or a suffix used in the scientific names of certain Texas species. Casas—a Chicano artist born in El Paso—seems to offer an ironic and dryly humorous commentary on the relevance of European-style nineteenth-century Texas art.
(Yinshi Lerman-Tan, 2020)
(Yinshi Lerman-Tan, 2020)
Not on view
In Collection(s)
The San Antonio Museum of Art is in the process of digitizing its permanent collection. This electronic record was created from historic documentation that does not necessarily reflect SAMA's complete or current knowledge about the object. Review and updating of such records is ongoing.
This resource has been made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities: Exploring the Human Endeavor.
