Opening: I’ve Had an Out of Body Experience: Ephemeral Structures and The Human Displacement of Hemisfair 1968

In I’ve Had an Out of Body Experience, San Antonio-based artist Ann Enzminger examines the physical and cultural aftermath of Hemisfair 1968, the international exposition that transformed the center of San Antonio. Conceived as a celebration of progress and international exchange, the fair also required the removal of an existing residential neighborhood and the displacement of the people who lived there.

Through painting, fiber, mapping, and sculptural forms, Enzminger considers what happens to a place when its physical traces are removed but its history remains. The exhibition focuses on the tension between the temporary structures of a World’s Fair and the lasting consequences of the redevelopment that made them possible. Hemisfair was designed to create a vision of San Antonio’s future, yet much of what preceded it was treated as something that could be erased.

Enzminger approaches this history through fragments, repetition, accumulation, and reconstruction. Rather than attempting to recreate the displaced neighborhood literally, she uses artistic processes to consider how places survive through memory, documentation, and imagination. Maps become both records and abstractions; repeated forms suggest the persistence of what has been removed; and humble, tactile materials point to the physical labor involved in constructing—and reconstructing—a sense of place.

The exhibition also considers the strange afterlife of World’s Fair architecture. Built to project an image of a modern, forward-looking city, many of Hemisfair’s structures were intended to be temporary. Their impermanence contrasts with the lasting consequences experienced by the neighborhood displaced to make way for them.

Nearly six decades after Hemisfair opened, I’ve Had an Out of Body Experience revisits this history from the present, asking what cities choose to preserve, what they allow to disappear, and how contemporary art might make visible the people and places obscured by narratives of civic progress.