The Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center in downtown San Antonio is awash in public art, the aesthetic face of the city beaming for out-of-towners. From a spectacular recycled material chandelier by Anita Valencia and an almost hidden group of nichos by San Antonio artists including David Zamora Casas, Cakky Brawley and the students of Say Si (a youth arts program) in the bottom of the building perfect for Tower of the Americas tourists to the intricate and overlooked Aztec-inflected patterns of the carpets by Louis Vega Trevino, the convention center bristles with some of San Antonio’s hidden art. Hidden in this case because it is not somewhere residents often find themselves.

Sometimes the art around us hides in plain sight. We do not see it, or recognize it, or name it as art, and so it remains part of the visual static of an over-stimulated world. At times, in hectic city life, we don’t look up above eye level, or down beneath our feet, and so we miss works which hover over us, or enfold us. And often we so constrict our idea of what “art” actually is, or where it might be found, that we can look straight at it and not recognize it. In this whirlwind tour through San Antonio I’m hoping for open eyes, suspended criticism, and a definition of art that includes design enhancements and embellishment.

And while the Torch of Friendship (at Alamo Plaza) is hard to miss –the dilemma for much public art—the more visible/prominent it is, the easier for skeptics to take shots at it. Within the Torch’s shadow, Anne Adams’ tiles for the VIA stop across the street, quilt-like and subtle, almost disappear into a category one might label urban decoration.

In fact, one could easily lose the rich tile tradition hidden before our very eyes throughout San Antonio, a tradition worthy of a separate story. Decidedly incomplete, the tour could include tile work throughout the River Walk, including the work of Oscar Alvarado and Malou Flato’s pieces at the street-level Houston Street bridge and her similar pieces outside the HEB Central Market in Alamo Heights. And don’t miss the historic tiles throughout the courtyard at the McNay Art Museum – culminating in the Peacock Staircase. Yes, even in an art museum there can be hidden art.

We take it for granted in San Antonio that the faux wood concrete works of Dionicio Rodriguez and contemporarily, of Carlos Cortez, are recognized as the works of art which they are. But especially on parts of the River Walk, where they appear amid the very trees they simulate, they may be hidden. This “trabajo rustico” is just one of the traditional arts among San Antonio’s hidden. Similarly, the ironwork in pocket parks along the river by artist Isaac Maxwell, part of a craft tradition in San Antonio, can, in part because of its utilitarian nature, be missed, or dismissed. Awareness of those traditions coupled with a community’s celebration of them by more than just presenting them, could turn these hidden arts into living treasures. Better still, the artists working in these art forms could be honored as civic treasures much like the Japanese living masters.

Overhead, in addition to Valencia’s (Convention Center) chandelier, look up at the Tiffany skylight in the lobby of the Menger Hotel and the Dale Chihuly Venetian ceiling at the San Antonio Museum of Art. Hard to see from the street, the drain spouts of the Tower Life Building (S. St. Mary’s St and ) are gargoyles, while the Aztec Theatre sports the all-knowing face of an Aztec in squares above street level. Below our feet, Gary Sweeney’s sneakers and other shoes are part of the flooring and wayfinding systems in the City’s parking garage (St. Mary’s and Travis Sts.), the Nancy Pawel tile-mural staircase at the San Antonio Children’s Museum, and on the sidewalks outside the Stierren Center of the McNay Art Museum a design motif that is repeated in staircase screen evocative of many things, perhaps brushstrokes.

While murals can hardly be considered hidden, a preponderance of them in San Antonio, more than 30 largely on the Westside, and the creations of the mural teams of San Anto Cultural Arts, are viewed mostly by their immediate community – evidences of pride and empowerment. Depression-era murals in the lobbies of the John H. Wood, Jr. Federal Courthouse and the San Antonio Express-News help one consider the community’s murals in a broader context. And though graffiti is, in the eyes of property owners and police, a crime, the exuberant canvas for graffiti that is the building at San Pedro Avenue and Quincy St., is an ever-changing gallery of voices – declarations of self in spray paint, not exactly hidden, but largely discredited.

Gary Sweeney’s over-sized tongue-in-cheek postcards from South Texas at the airport slyly comment on our visual culture and subtleties. So to, the beautiful street signage for the Deco District (Old Town Fredericksburg Road), done in tile by students from ASKEW, compete with a proliferation of signage along the road, disappear. And oddly, in an atrium entryway to the downtown San Antonio Central Library, probably because it is the only lighting in a space we pass through quickly on our way in, the neon sculpture by Stephen Antonakos entitled “Blue Room” is too easy to overlook, not enough of a space to modulate our entry from red outside to yellow in.

Though it is hard to talk of galleries and art centers as hidden. sometimes because of their location (outside what are thought of as art neighborhoods), they, and their good work, are not given their due. Bihl Haus Arts, in the Primrose Apartments on Fredericksburg Road, in a magnificently restored stone building has, in a few short years of its existence become an important force on the arts scene – exhibiting important local work, actively programming around the work, presenting literary events on a regular basis, and working tirelessly in the field of community arts development. Gallery Nord at 2009 NW Military Hwy. is both an important venue in the arts in San Antonio, but also an architectural gem from the late Allison Peery, a San Antonio modernist architect. Alternative spaces in homes and businesses, small venues like the San Antonio Art League Museum on the River Walk, even when they are in the midst of neighborhoods celebrated for their arts organizations, are also sometimes missed.

On the other end of the spectrum, there are extraordinary university and corporate collections throughout San Antonio that are both public, and not. Trinity University (Hildebrand & Stadium Drive) has a wonderful collection of outdoor sculptures available for viewing, USAA (Fredericksburg & Huebner Rds.), has a massive collection mostly related to the Air Force, the “employer” of its founding president and the Capital Group Companies has outdoor sculpture and indoor works of art. The law firm of Matthews & Branscomb had such a collection, since sold off three years after its merger with Cox & Smith. And AT&T’s collection, before its recent move to Dallas, was recently on display at the McNay Art Museum.

Mission Road on the way to Mission Concepcion, part of the National Park Service’s Mission Trail, winds through industrial neighborhoods and approaches the mission with social service agency campuses across the street – St. PJ and Seton Home. Amid these institutions, along a bend in the road, a Best Mart sits, and on its outer wall a mural from 2007 by Joe Lopez and Andy Benevides. The mural humanizes the industrial, the institutional, and the historical, in a way that is uniquely San Antonio.

And while I have overlooked the churches of San Antonio and their presence as works of art in the community, it is somehow appropriate to end with Peacock Alley; the lobby of the Wyndham St. Anthony Hotel, so called because it comes complete with overstuffed “peacock” magnificence (high school students, with proms at the St Anthony, recall it fondly, as do partakers of an over-the-top Sunday brunch in that encrusted space.)

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