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San Antonio Museum of Art Celebrates Opening of Rodin: The Human Experience, Selections from the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Collections

A week of events marked the early March opening at the San Antonio Museum of Art of the Foundation’s large traveling exhibition, Rodin: The Human Experience, Selections from the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Collec-tions. Beautifully installed in one of the Museum’s remodeled galleries — the Museum is in a nineteenth-century brewery building — the show opened with two days of receptions and a public lecture by Judith Sobol, Executive Director of the Cantor Foundation, who also curated the show. In San Antonio the show was installed under the expert stewardship of SAMA Curator of European Art Merribell Parsons and her team. (Merribell, Judith, and Cantor Foundation Vice President Ryan Fisher are left-to-right in the top left photograph, above.)

It’s always fascinating for us to see how different museums present our shows. The San Antonio Museum of Art wove the experience of this Rodin exhibition into a museum-wide multisensory tour it offers to visitors who are visually impaired. It combines music, scent, and touch to bring the experience of the sculpture to those who cannot see well. San Antonio’s tour leader Norma Gomez-Perez reported that “touching the art surprised all our guests who lovingly did it and couldn’t keep their [gloved] hands away from the pieces [in all the Museum galleries] allowed to be touched: Sekhmet, Rodin’s Jean d’Aire, Rodin’s Caryatid with Stone and J.L. Rivera Barrera’s Enamoramiento. Incredible music selections and well matched scents completed the presentations beautifully. This time we offered a very brief explanation and reasons for the scents selected, something that we will continue doing because it proved to be valuable and appreciated by all. We heard so many positive comments from the visitors, they were so grateful for this tour!” Excelente San Antonio!

The exhibition closes in San Antonio on May 29; it travels from here to the Joel and Lila Harnett Gallery at the University of Richmond, where it opens in August.