Weekend Update 6.10.25

This weekend in San Antonio, art invited us to look beyond the gallery from our grocery store shelves, our urban spaces, and even our own reflections. The standout exhibition, Some Truths in Advertising by Bria Digita at Flight Gallery, boldly reframes the visual language of everyday consumerism into sharp social critique. From repurposed H-E-B packaging to billboard takeovers and a shopping cart full of river-snatched plastic bags, the show doesn’t just speak. It confronts.

Other exhibitions across the city echoed this call for deeper looking. Through identity, process, and place, artists explored both public systems and private lives, offering works that linger long after viewing. Here’s a look at what opened and what’s worth seeing while you can.

Installation view of Some Truths in Advertising at Flight Gallery.

Some Truths in Advertising by Bria Digita at Flight Gallery feels both timely and timeless. Though many of the works were created in 2020, their urgency feels freshly relevant today. On the right wall, it almost feels Warholian in the onslaught of familiar branding and advertising from your local H-E-B, brought into an art gallery context. Bria Digita’s artistic practice uses Warhol’s challenge of blurring high and low art and object-value in our consumer culture to deliver striking social critiques. Bria Digita’s approach is to use the familiar fonts and layouts of frequently purchased items, relabeling them with powerful, factual social commentary. 

For example, a Delmonte fruit can has been rebranded to “American Inequality” with the product is “Education” in scripted font. Instead of the familiar fruit at the bottom, there are crayons. The nutritional label that many of us skip over now delivers facts about how school segregation still exists today due to gerrymandering which allows the federal government to “invest substantially more money” in majority-white school communities. 

Installation view of Some Truths in Advertising at Flight Gallery.

This is just one of many examples of Bria Digita’s infiltration of H-E-B. This transformation occurs to Hellman’s Mayo (Blue Lives Matter & False Narratives), Ocean Spray Whole Cranberry Sauce (San Antonio police funding), Morton’s Salt (variations of problematic police policies - qualified immunity, unions, militarization, and what defunding actually means), Campbell Soup (justice for various police brutality victims), Spam (speak up), and Jif peanut butter (Black lives matter). A striking detail: The UPC code remains unchanged, anchoring these objects in their real-life retail context. The work is displayed in threes: a large framed print, a vinyl photographic print of the works on H-E-B shelves, and the physical product itself. Often, these were purchased without the consumer noticing the different until home. 

Installation view of Some Truths in Advertising at Flight Gallery.

Bria Digita shares other archival documents of other subversive projects here too. Vinyl photographic prints reveal repurposed billboard’s on San Antonio’s south and west sides that were abandoned. Various graphic designs supported the racial reckonings of 2020. A shopping cart sitting in the middle of the gallery space, filled with plastic bags collected from San Antonio’s rivers and streets over a one-month period stands as a powerful environmental statement. At the back of the gallery, various works support this current project.  The show requires slow looking and repeated visits. Its sharp insights resonate  deeply with contemporary life in San Antonio. 

Installation view of Sabra Booth’s Frack House (left and right of window) and Hannah Hurricane’s Garden Party (right wall) in Proof - Wounds of Identity at Agarita Lofts.

Elsewhere, exhibitions invited moments of intimacy and reflection. Proofs - Wounds of Identity at Agarita Lofts blends domestic space with gallery polish. Curated by Jon Hinojsa, it offers personal and emotionally direct work from local artists, thriving in the setting of a literal living room. Dinah Coakley’s solo show, Tragedy and Comedy: A Self-Portrait, at the Blue Star Artists Collective marks a notable step up in quality, with thoughtfully labeled and thematically aligned prints.  Olivia Gray’s Biophilia, featured at the same collective, expands emotional registers with soft, sensorial explorations of the body within nature. 

Installation view of Return of a Mutt Cubist at the Beacon at Midtown. 

Other shows focused on process and place. Eric Martinez’s The Sketch at Slab Cinema Art House conceptualizes architectural experience through sketch form.  The work traces realized and unrealized visions of life and space, though the high hanging may distract some viewers. Visions at the Blue Art Gallery centers around Mauro de la Tierra’s paintings of vibrant, almost neon, nature paintings that are still evolving but visually arresting. Near downtown, The Return of a Mutt Cubist at the Beacon at Midtown showcases Norman Avila, David A. Elizondo, and Karl Lubbering, with dense art historical references and sharp execution, revealing clear intellectual rigor. 

Along with a studio art sale by artists preparing for a Berlin Residency, the Contemporary opened En las Sombras, Nuestros Fantasmas Bachchan. The exhibit is powerful and deserves its own deep dive, a forthcoming review will explore its themes of surveillance and heritage.

Across San Antonio this weekend, artists asked us to pay attention. Not just to their work, but to the systems, structures, and stories around us. From repackaged consumer goods to intimate introspectives, billboard interventions to body-in-nature studies, each show brought its own urgency and depth. Whether you’re drawn to quiet moments of self-reflection or the bold confrontation of cultural norms, there’s something in these exhibitions that will meet you where you are. And maybe challenge where you’ve been.