Antonio E. Garcia

Garcia taught himself fresco from books on Egyptian, Aztec and Etruscan technique, and then taught others. He spent more than twenty-five years on the Del Mar College faculty and led painting workshops in Saltillo, Mexico, every year from 1954 through at least 1971. An art historian from the University of Texas called him a particularly influential teacher. He also worked as a sketch artist for the Corpus Christi police; a 1957 drawing helped catch a man who robbed two stores. Some of his frescoes took five or six months of near-continuous work on scaffolding.

What the plaque says

Antonio E. Garcia (1901-1997) Remembered for his contributions to the art community, Antonio E. Garcia was a talented Mexican American artist who created wood carvings, public frescoes and murals, and impacted generations of artists. Antonio E. Garcia was born in Monterrey, Mexico, in 1901. In 1914, during the Mexican Revolution, Garcia and his two sisters were sent to San Diego, Texas, to live with their grandfather and two aunts. After high school, Garcia attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago from 1927 to 1930, where he earned two art prizes in 1929. In 1935, Garcia and his wife, Herminia Gonzales Garcia, moved to Corpus Christi where he utilized influences from his Mexican heritage to create award-winning frescoes. The self-taught fresco painter created his first major public work, March on Washington, in 1933 for the Dallas Museum through the Public Works Administration. In 1936, Garcia's easel painting, Woman Before a Mirror, a life-size representation of his wife, was exhibited at the Texas Centennial Exhibition in Dallas. The easel painting, Juneteenth Review, garnered notoriety for Garcia when it won first prize in the Southern State League Exhibit in 1949. Between 1942 and 1948, Garcia painted three Buon (True) frescoes for his parish Church of the Sacred Heart in Corpus Christi. Each painting is over thirty feet high and together they cover the sanctuary dome. Other prominent works include Mexican Annunciation at Presidio La Bahia in Goliad (1946), the 44-foot fresco of the Immaculate Conception in the Corpus Christi Seminary Chapel (1960) and wood carvings at Temple Beth-El and St. Thomas & Martin Episcopal Church. Garcia was also a book illustrator, one of the founders of the South Texas Art League in 1936 and taught courses at Del Mar College. A true inspiration to all who knew him, Garcia's art legacy continues to influence generations. (2016)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Mirador de la Flor — 0.9 mi
  Corpus Christi's bayfront memorial to Selena Quintanilla-Pérez, the Tejano singer from this city, killed in 1995 at twenty-three, visited by about thirty thousand people a year.
• Art Museum of South Texas — 1.4 mi
  Philip Johnson's 1972 museum on the Corpus Christi bayfront, joined in 2006 by Ricardo Legorreta's Miller Wing, holding more than 2,000 works mostly from Texas and the Americas.
• Texas State Aquarium — 1.6 mi
  A nonprofit aquarium on the tip of Corpus Christi Beach built around the Gulf and the Caribbean, with the largest coastal wildlife rescue center in Texas behind the exhibits.
• USS Lexington Museum on the Bay — 1.8 mi
  An Essex-class carrier of 1943 moored off North Beach, the Blue Ghost that Tokyo Rose kept reporting sunk, and the Navy's training carrier for nearly three decades after.

More markers nearby

• Captain Enrique Villarreal and Rincon del Oso Land Grant — steps away
• Henry Lawrence Kinney — steps away
• Kelsey Memorial Methodist Church (Iglesia Metodista Kelsey Memorial) — 0.2 mi
• LULAC — 0.3 mi