Linda Hardberger, First Lady of the arts

(photo by Guillermina Zabala)

When did u fall in love with art?
I was born in Mexico and then I lived in Europe until I was 14 years old. I lived in Rome and I lived in Spain. So I was around art. It was sort of part of my existence. In Europe a lot of the things you do on Sundays is go to the museums, and that’s what I got used to when I was a child. However, even though I loved art, I never got into art until after many years of work. I got a library degree and worked at SAMA [San Antonio Museum of Art] as a librarian. That’s when I decided to go back to school and get a degree in Art History and be a curator. And that’s what I did. Just around the time I started working for my degree, Mr. [Robert L.B.] Tobin called me and asked me if I was interested, that he was going to give his collection to the McNay [Museum], and whether I was interested in taking that job. I said "Sure!"

Art is for everyone in Europe, unlike here. Here only ‘certain’ people go to art galleries, you agree?
Yes, I do. A lot of it has to do with visual education. In other words: if you’re surrounded by things that are artistic, whether it’s the Coliseum, or sculptures everywhere, or like you have in Rome, with [Gian Lorenzo] Bernini sculptures everywhere you turn... The churches are full of art. So people grow up seeing that. Their visual education is automatic. And it’s like when you listen to music. You may listen to pop, and then decide pop is really boring and get more educated and your ear gets better at it, and you get more sophisticated and move to jazz or classical music. That’s what happened to me. And I think that’s what happens to a lot of people in Europe. Here for some reason it is always considered to be an elitist thing to be interested in art or music or those kinds of things. In Europe you see the people standing in line to go to museums or the theater or whatever, it’s just more accessible there, you’re around it all the time, it doesn’t seem to be more foreign. Here, you’re surrounded by McDonald’s, and that’s not very pretty. [Art] isn’t something we’re accustomed to. Public art in America is very new, other than monuments. But we don’t put wonderful sculptures in our plazas. For one thing, we don’t have that many plazas. You have to go into a mausoleum of some sort, a museum, and that is kind of off-putting. And you can see what a difference it makes when you put art on the streets. When Phillip did Luminaria, thousands of people came and looked at art because it wasn’t in a building that they felt was not part of them, it wasn’t a foreign thing.

What kind of art interests you?
[pointing to the art at her office at the Tobin Foundation] All this art belongs to Mr. Tobin. My taste is pretty eclectic. I like a whole lot of abstract art; most of the things I like are abstract. Most of the things I bought over the years have been by local or Texas artists. And because it’s gotten so expensive, I had to limit what I collected to works on paper. So, unless I inherited it from my parents, mostly have been works on paper.

How long you lived in Mexico?
Four years. Then Spain for four more.

Who’s your favorite artist and why?
I can’t pick one. Someone like Jasper Jones (Georgia, 1930) is one of my real favorites. I’m not a purist in art, I like the intellectual part of art, and I think Jones is a very intellectual artist. There’s a lot going on in his paintings that have to do with the mind, so I really love his work. I love a guy named Cy Twombly (Virginia, 1928) because I like to see the artist’s hand in the work, and [he] does these wonderful big drawings and I love to see his personality on the canvas. Those are two of my favorite.

When your husband decided to run for mayor, if I didn’t misread at first, you were a little… let’s just say it wasn’t in your plans…
No, it wasn’t… [she laughs]

But then you learned how to live with it, I guess. Did you see it as a great opportunity to do something for San Antonio art? Did you know art was going to be your agenda?
Yeah. I really felt I had the inside track. I knew I could facilitate a lot of things through that, because Phillip does listen and he’s also interested in art, he’s very comfortable with that. I became… not a spokesperson, but I was the person to come to when there were art issues. I haven’t always been successful but we tried. And Phillip has done an amazing amount of giving more money to artists and so forth. But really two things I ended up doing: art and community gardens, which is the other thing I have a passion for. Ironically, those are two things I don’t do: I’m not an artist, and I don’t garden. But I like the ability to make that happen. So yes, I did see that as a plus.

Tell me about San Antonio. It seems there’s more artists per capita here than in places like LA. Why is that?
I think one of the things that really made a big difference was Linda Pace. ArtPace really put [SA] on the map. But I don’t know what the synergy is. I know Austin is really much better in the performing arts, lots of theaters, opera company… Ours is still growing. Immigration trends… Somebody comes and they tell a friend to come. It’s fairly inexpensive to live here, unlike Boston or LA, and it is, for artists, visually a very compelling place. It’s green, a lot of mixed cultures here, particularly Latin American. That really helps the visual arts. It doesn’t help the theater particularly. The other thing I think I would love to see, and I haven been able to get it done, is that I would like to see San Antonio as the gateway of Latin America, I want it to be known for that. If you want to know something about Latin America, come to San Antonio. The food…

[interrupting] Latin USA or Latin America, the continent?
The continent. If you wanna learn about Latin American music, food, customs, you come to UNAM or the Culinary Institute. And what I would love to see here is a Latin music museum. We teach mariachi music in the schools, and hopefully we’ll start teaching trío music. I’d like that to be our brand: ‘San Antonio, the gateway of Latin America.’ At some level we’re like the Disneyland of Latin America, but it’s not Disneyland: it’s real. If you think cars, you think Detroit. Well, if you think Latin America, I’d like for people to think of San Antonio. And I was very upset when I found out that the Latin Grammy is going to be held in Houston. That shouldn’t be where the Latin Grammys are at—the Latin Grammy should be here.

The Academy claims, among other reasons, that Houston has more hotels…
C’mon, how many hotels do you need?

If LARAS [Latin Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences] ever considers it, would you like to be involved?
Oh, absolutely. I’m not an expert in music, but I just know that event belongs here. [Music] is a very important part of the whole culture. When I was at the McNay I wanted to redo the carpas, the tent shows, and music has always been a part of the carpas. This is the kind of things that I think are interesting to people. We can only sell so many tacos and eat so many enchiladas and have so many mariachis, which are wonderful, but there’s a lot more than that. We should even do more with the corridas, do more…

The corridas or the corridos?
The corridos, yeah.

Oh, good. Corridas are amongst my least favorite activities… Corridos, I love.
Yes… Phillip wanted to go to the corridas and I said "No way…" [laughs]

What do you think of SAY Sí? Do you know of any similar programs in the US? [disclosure: my wife is SAY Sí’s Media Arts Director]
It’s a very unusual program. My only… It’s not a criticism, it’s a fear, that it goes on the energy of Jon [Hinojosa, SAY Sí’s director]. I really want Jon to be mentoring people. I know he’s young, but I want it to continue and I don’t want it to be there only because of Jon. If he leaves, it collapses. I want it to become an institution and I want it to be very important. There’s something that’s so horrible and I don’t understand why politicians don’t get this: art is always considered a frill, it’s something ‘extra’. As far as I’m concerned, football is a frill. If you’re going to get rid of something, why are we getting rid of art instead of football? I don’t understand. If we’re going to start naming frills… You can do sports, and exercise, go outside… But you don’t have to do football, and that costs a lot of money. But nobody wants to cut football, and everybody wants to cut arts. Arts is completely cut out of all the schools, and now they don’t teach music and art. This is one of the things. But the really fabulous part about Jon’s program is that it teaches these kids that you can do something with art, you can make money. It’s important to be creative, but it’s also important that these kids really breathe art and make a living out of it. The things that they teach in terms of movies and all this other stuff is fantastic and it’s not being taught anywhere.

You mean he should be training someone…
I’m sure he is, I’m sure he is. I just don’t want it to be a Jon’s thing only.

Isn’t First Friday overrated?
Anything that will introduce people to art, fine with me. [FF] got a little rowdy, it turned into a drinking gathering, some sort of Fiesta number. But one of the things that we discovered with Luminaria is that we had very little drinks [in Luminaria] and it became a family affair. Where you here for Luminaria?

No, I was in South America…
For one night, from 5 pm, I think, to midnight. There was a committee and people submitted their work. It was pretty open. Any artist in San Antonio could apply: artists, sculptors, painters, whoever. They were in Main Plaza and down Houston Street., open to the public, all free, and 100,000 people showed up. The Symphony played, the opera sang, people who never heard opera before heard it. We had theater in various theater places, some outside, some inside, many storefronts open, [artist] Jesse Treviño put a huge piece on the street and people asked him questions, and all the artists the same. They were not intimidated by the artists. One of the things that happens is that if you encourage people to go to museums, there’s a person who tells them “This work is important because…” That’s all well and good and it’s nice to know about the artist and his or her work. But a lot of it comes from your personal reaction to the work. You don’t need somebody to tell you “This is good” or “This is bad.” It’s just what you like. Eventually your taste is going to get better. At first you may like a sofa painting, but later on you can like something that’s not sold at a motel. And the more you expose people to that, the more they make up their own minds and the more art will become part of their lives. There’s a lot of people in San Antonio that don’t have art in their houses. None. Not even something their kids made. And that stuff should be on their walls.

They say "It’s expensive," but then they buy a 1,000 inch TV…
…which costs a zillion dollars… To me it’s all part of who I am.

What do you think your best art-related achievements are since your husband took office?
Luminarias is certainly one. I didn’t do that so much but certainly both Phillip and I increased funding for the arts. The first thing we did after Phil was sworn in, that night we went to the opera. People were very grateful that we go to the opera and we’re seen at art galleries. This opened up a world that people thought a mayor shouldn’t do. Then there’s Main Plaza, still in the works, and when that gets finished it will be wonderful. We’ve got people who don’t just build something but immediately think we should put art there. The new airport is going to have a lot of art, mostly local. A lot of the art in the Hyatt Plaza is by local people. All we really did was open a door to acceptability to that being the 'in' thing to do. I think people now are more aware that art is part of their lives.

How do u see yourself after Mayor Hardberger leaves office?
I think I’ll always will be involved. But to be real honest, the first thing we’re going to do is… We’re big boat people and we have a boat we live on for long periods of time.

Talk about battling your demons…
You know, I’m in control now, it’s different. [laughs] So we’re going to go back and get away from all this. It’s has a lot of great parts but also difficult parts, it takes a lot of your time. It takes you away from your friends a lot. So we’ll go back to being who we were, but we’re always going to be a part of San Antonio. There’s a lot of things I’m very interested in. I always thought our job was to push the envelope. San Antonians tend to be very comfortable with the way they are. We need to be a little uncomfortable, we need to push a little bit. Phil is a big adventurer physically, I’m more adventurous mentally. I’d like to see markets with people bringing pies and bread, like they have in other places. We need to come out of our air conditioned homes and interact with people. Main Plaza did that and community gardens will do.

What type of cities would you like San Antonio to be like?
This is goin to go on forever! [laughs] Chicago. In terms of American cities, Chicago more than any other. They have the Millennium Park, an amazing place. A wonderful community garden program, very forward-thinking [city], and the other thing that really made me want to be like Chicago is that, from the taxi driver to the clerk in the grocery store to whoever, they’re all so proud of their city. We were there on our boat for ten days and we would take the bus. Their theater is just fantastic. Great art museums, all of that. But everybody would say “Don’t you love Chicago?” I want us to be that proud. And I want us to be beautiful, and Chicago, in a lot of places, is really beautiful. They have flowers everywhere, parks… We’ll never have problems with tourists: we have the Alamo. But if we really make this city beautiful and we make it vibrant… And I’m talking about the heart of the city, downtown, and that’s my real passion. We’ve lost it in the suburbs, as far as I’m concerned. I mean, there’s nothing we can do. People want to live there, that’s fine. But I want lots of people in Houston Street, on Commerce, storefronts full of retailers, and I don’t know how to do that, but I’d love to do that. You go to the Magic Mile in Chicago and there’s people walking everywhere. That’s what I love about Chicago more than any other American city.

What about a city outside of the US?
We were just in a little town in northern Spain called Oviedo, and they have this wonderful park in the middle and outdoor coffee places where you could sit. This car thing that we have in America is so awful, nobody walks anywhere. Everybody gets in the car and… This is kind of a tangent, but it tells a lot. I grew up in Europe. My daughter and I flew to Frankfurt not long ago. We had never been to Frankfurt, and we were looking out from the window, and I suddenly felt at home, and I couldn’t figure out what the problem was. And I suddenly figured it out: I have a psychological geography imprinted in me, that it’s very different from America. In Europe the city grew from the middle out. So there’s always this incredibly strong heart in every city. And the outline area is where they farm and grow. Of course, now cities have suburbs as well, but still, it’s still this very dense centered city. In America, in the western days, you owned a piece of land if you went and lived on it. You didn’t have a centered city. Everybody lived on farms and ranches. And they came into the city to buy things and so forth, but they weren’t of the city. Texas, for example, has never had a governor from a big city. We still consider ourselves rural people. People moved out to Canyon Lake in San Antonio and get mad because the deer eat their flowers. That’s what the country is about! If you don’t want that, move to the city! We are not a very good urban city, especially in the middle. We’re very good on both coasts, especially in Los Angeles, but we don’t really have a sense of urbaness. Whatever city you pick to be like, I’d like San Antonio to be more urban, more dense in the middle. And all of us interacting and knowing who your neighbors are.

Arts are underfunded. What can politicians do?
It’s very difficult for municipalities to even keep up infrastructure, let alone do the other. The only way that can change is by electing visionaries, people who understand that the arts are important. The art education system in this country is horrible, and the reason is that we don’t value that. We don’t pay teachers a salary that will attract people who can do that. Until we value that, until we understand that art and every other component is part of what makes up our brain system and our thought process, we’re never going to get funds for art in the school. We’re always testing, testing, all we do is teach for the test. If you go to the public schools in Houston, theirs is very different: there they teach kids how to think. You don’t fill people with facts. Most people still think Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction! If you don’t teach kids how to think, the education system is useless. And one of the things art does is how to teach. There’s a structure there that you have to think about, it’s not fact-based. You don’t just say “red is the color red.” You need to know what to do with that color red.

But you elect them and, after two terms, they’re gone…
It really goes to the federal. I don’t know who’s going to be president, but if you look back to when JFK was president, what was important? Music was important, because Jackie liked music. They had art in the White House, they set the tone. If we can get people to run and set the tone… The Czech Republic had a playwright as a poet.

Everyone I know who’s been to Prague, fell in love with that city, to the point of obsession…
It’s a fabulous town! There’s a town I’d love San Antonio to be like. But we don’t value that. America was populated by kind of losers, people who couldn’t make it [elsewhere] or were persecuted, whatever… They didn’t bring those qualities. The brought religion, which is very important for them, that’s why they came here, they brought hardwork, but they didn’t bring all those other things… The paintings… that got left in Europe. And I get so upset when Cheney talks [despectively] about “old Europe.” Old Europe is kind of important! [laughs] That’s where we come from, it’s our heritage. We don’t talk about ‘American fries,’ you know… The French have given us a lot. So did the English, German, Latin Americans… We don’t pay any attention to that. I’ve been talking too much… [laughs]

Keep talking! What can San Antonio learn from those cities?
The hardest part about public art is that art is difficult, it’s not easy. It’s, again, the whole pushing of the envelope. I remember when in New York they put a Richard Serra sculpture. He does these very large iron archs and circles, and things, and they’re very tall. And they put it right in front of City Hall in NY, and everybody was terrified because they thought, I don’t know, that they were going to be raped behind it, because people couldn’t see you. But it was a very brutal piece of sculpture, it was in your face, you couldn’t ignore it, it was there. Well, that’s what art really does—it is supposed to be in your face, it’s supposed to make you question "How do I feel about this piece?" There’s a very fine line between a monumental sculpture that has a historical meaning in some fashion, whether it’s a memorial to the people who died in Vietnam, for example, and… That’s a very different thing, that really isn’t art. I mean, it’s artistic, but it’s a different kind of art, let’s put it that way. You want to get good quality. I don’t know if you’ve been to the AT&T Center, where the Spurs play… That kind of thing, to introduce art in a place like that, that was brilliant. It’s all Texas art. It’s in there and it doesn’t attack you, but you see it. And if we can make art in a kind of place like that, and not have it be an issue, then we can do more of that. But it’s very difficult. Chicago’s Millennium Park was millions of dollars over budget. And people [in SA] were having a fit because Main Plaza was over budget. It’s hard. “Why are u spending money on this when we need housing?” There’s so many needs, and it’s difficult.