Late artist Michael Tracy hit the Texas border village of San Ygnacio like a “cyclone.” His creative aggression melded with an empathic awareness of his adopted home.
San Ygnacio, Texas, is a tiny dust mote of a town situated on the bank of the Rio Grande, an hour south of Laredo.1 With a population hovering around 500, one giant saguaro cactus as a main tourist attraction, and not an art gallery in sight, the town appears to be as far from the New York art world as an artist might get.
This is where abstract painter and sculptor Michael Tracy chose to make a home base, retreating from the heady, moneyed, status-obsessed ’80s-era environs haunted by glitzy art world denizens such as close friend Julian Schnabel, gallerist Mary Boone, and so many others on the trajectory to fame and fortune. Tracy continued working in San Ygnacio from the late 1970s until his death in June 2024.
The title of Tracy’s posthumous exhibition The Elegy of Distance—at the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio through July 27—is well-chosen, four distinct words laying out a fundamental question of what home can mean. The show draws a neat circle around his six-decade career, closing the distance between his first museum show at the McNay in 1971 and his later output. Tracy’s San Ygnacio home was a pinion of his practice, the central motor generating the necessary, paradoxical groundedness and ethereal otherness motivating his work. It was the launchpad from which he gained big-picture views of the otherworlds penetrating and infusing this one.
He was described as… a ‘cyclone of a person,’ as well as ‘a really nice guy.’
Even as he chose what colleagues have described as self-exile, Tracy maintained active connections to the far-flung outside world. A frequent traveler, he is said to have also lived in Mexico City and India, though most strongly identified with his headquarters on the U.S.-Mexico border. He might or might not have been close with locals, depending on who does the telling, and he regularly drew outsiders to town for studio visits.
Viewed from a distance, Tracy’s contradictions are legion. He demonstrated love for San Ygnacio by buying up a reported seven buildings in town, yet called it “this godforsaken place” and left frequently for extended travels. He has variously been called an exile, outcast, pilgrim, voyager, frontiersman, mystic—and conversely an empiricist and “neither a mystic nor an idealist.”
He was described as flamboyant, prickly, turbulent, loud, and a “cyclone of a person,” as well as “a really nice guy,” an iconoclast and maker of icons, and a dramatic, deeply sophisticated, deeply spiritual transgressor. Most puzzlingly, he was pegged as an insider and an outsider by the same person in the same sentence.2
Tracy’s art was unabashedly religious, burgeoning with Christian symbols—cruciforms, icons, reliquaries, votives, memento mori, altars, tombs, offerings—first imprinted on him as an altar boy in Ohio. Figural elements are rare in his work, though references to them are everywhere, from the bold gestural abstraction concordant with his late-generation Abstract Expressionist counterparts, to crosses as bearers of absent bodies toward noncorporeal destinations.
The most striking figural presence in his paintings and sculptures is violence—sharp knives, spikes, daggers, and oversize needles pierce skeins of paint and canvas and wood, presumable metaphors for fleshly presence, vulnerability, and a desire to penetrate surface illusions.
One grand performance, The River Pierce: Sacrifice II,3 the 1990 ritual immolation of a large-scale cruciform sculpture on the Rio Grande, essentialized Tracy’s concerns. Said to have been modeled on San Ygnacio’s annual Good Friday Via Dolorosa procession, the artist and collaborators burned Tracy’s sculpture Cruz: La Pasión (1982–87) in recognition of the waterborne border’s complicated history and ongoing tensions.
[Tracy] spoke of the ‘ongoing drama of two distinct cultures hemorrhaging into each other.’
Animated by life on the contentious, binational river, Tracy crossed between devotional impulses and head-on recognition of human-caused suffering wrought by his colonial ancestors. The fitful acceptance of such contradictions might be what drove him away from the secular cacophony of art-world cities to the contemplative, confrontational silence of the frontier.
Tracy drew motivation from living in a place of conflict, where humanity’s lowest, most violently selfish nationalistic impulses are met with their potential for transcendence. Acutely conscious of cross-border migration issues, he spoke of the “ongoing drama of two distinct cultures hemorrhaging into each other” with attendant “sociological angst and despair,” and apparently recognized that he was one of “these people who had no right to be here in the first place,” speaking of those who overtook land inhabited by Indigenous peoples whose descendants he now lived among.
It’s fair to call Tracy a gentrifier in the vein of Donald Judd in Marfa, and a cultural appropriationist incorporating the colonialized symbologies of Mexico and other cultures, but his passion for borderlands and colonial politics moved him to address inequalities wrought by oppressive U.S. interference throughout Latin America.
San Ygnacio is the quiet, isolated place where this loud character chose to inhabit silence. He tuned into electromagnetic fields and listened to stones, harmonizing with the voices of the dead and the agony of self-exiled migrants seeking a distant home.
For a searching traveler, home is the orbital center. For mortals with Christian predilections, home is the soul’s final, eternal destination, far from this world.
Tracy’s corpus of gestural artworks and cultural preservation projects were his attempt to close the distance between home and travel, permanence and impermanence, the seen and the unseen—between this world and the next. These works resurrect the deceased artist’s restless spirit, carrying the essence of a very particular time and a very specific place.
1. Yes, south—subverting assumptions about the Texas/Mexico border, San Ygnacio is almost directly south of the border towns of Laredo and Nuevo Laredo. Mexico is to the west, and the Rio Grande—called Rio Bravo on the Mexico side—is actually directly north of half of San Ygnacio.
2. This paragraph draws from an amalgam of direct quotes from multiple sources: Christopher Rincón’s downloadable catalogue essay for The Elegy of Distance at the McNay Art Museum, a 1984 feature-length portrait of the artist by writer Lisa Liebman for Artforum, a 2018 story from The New York Times by Serena Soloman republished by WRAL News in Laredo, a 2021 Texas Highways article on Tracy’s historic preservation efforts, the Glasstire obituary by Roberto Tejeda from July 2, 2024, and the Adam Nossiter-penned obituary that appeared in The New York Times on July 5, 2024.
3. This performance lent its title to what would become Tracy’s San Ygnacio–based nonprofit River Pierce Foundation, the holder and overseer of the artist’s historical preservation efforts including the restoration of several buildings. Tracy’s fervent focus on historical preservation sometimes provoked tension with locals, who report having been admonished when making alterations to their homes without the same concern for maintaining the town’s historic character.
