Joe Diaz Collector of Culture
By Joseph Bravo
I first met Joe Diaz back in the late 1990's when I was working as a registrar at the San Antonio Museum of Art. He had loaned a couple of works for an exhibit and it was my responsibility to return them to his home. In my capacity at the museum, I did this type of duty frequently and was accustomed to entering the houses of wealthy collectors and seeing how the other half lived. But on this particular day, I realized I was witness to something special and was meeting a man who was more special still. People collect art for all kinds of reasons, prestige, social climbing, interior decorating, tax write-offs etc. But once in great while you meet a collector of true passion, vision and expertise. Joe Diaz was clearly such an individual.
John Hernandes, Anvil Supreme. 1988. Acrylic on wood. 22" x 14.8"
.I had spent many years closely working with Gilbert M. Denman, Jr., who had amassed the most important collection of Western antiquities in the region. This experience had spoiled me and, as such, I was relatively jaded. Denman had spent a lifetime, and a not inconsiderable fortune, creating a world-class antiquities collection. He sought the advice of the most illustrious scholars and archaeologists, he traveled the world visiting museums and consulting curators. Denman also collected an impressive art history library with thousands of volumes that he actually read. Like Joe Diaz, Denman was also a man of vision who collected in order to share rather than hoard his holdings. After my years with Gilbert, I wasn't easily impressed and it took more than a few famous names hanging on your walls to get my attention. But that day I walked into Joe Diaz's place, I knew immediately that here was an individual cut of a very similar and very rare cloth.
On his walls was not the typical contemporary art collection. It wasn't about prestige and name dropping. It was about art and passion. Pieces were stacked three deep everywhere one looked. Every flat service, vertical and horizontal, was covered. This home was clearly not interior decorated so much as laminated with art. Unlike so many collectors, who treated the museum's staff like the help, Joe was welcoming and lacked the typical condescension to which I had grown accustomed. He was enthusiastic about his collection and couldn't wait to show me the art that so moved him. Joe had an anecdote for every work and seemed to be personally acquainted with just about every artist he collected. This was no small achievement since there were hundreds of works on display by dozens of artists. This was contemporary art like I had rarely seen before and had never seen collected with such an astute eye and in such impressive quantity. On Diaz's walls was the document of the panoply of the Mestizaje aesthetic experience. Works were figurative, stylized, narrative and well-crafted, all things that were so very out of fashion in the more mainstream contemporary vernacular of the period. I was blown away. Being a local boy from San Antonio, some of the artists I was familiar with, others I was not. Eventually, I too became personally acquainted with many of the artists represented in the Joe Diaz collection and quite a few of them I count among my personal friends and colleagues.
I credit that day at Joe's place as a seminal moment in my aesthetic life. From Joe Diaz I learned that there were indeed a host of contemporary artists making what I considered to be fine art and that this work was important. Joe Diaz is a man on a mission and, to some extent, that mission has become my own as well. So when I got the opportunity to interview my friend Joe Diaz for this article, it was a privilege for which I have been waiting for well over a decade.
Joe Diaz has been collecting for about a quarter century, and when asked about how many pieces are in his collection he is a little coy. Joe says that there are between seven hundred fifty and a thousand. I suspect that is a gross understatement but, like most enthusiastic collectors, he spends more time acquiring art than counting it. According to Diaz, the collection has never been cataloged and, by this point, to do so would be an arduous and not inexpensive undertaking.
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When asked about the challenges of collecting art, Diaz predictably responded, “Storage and taking care of it. With Mexican-American art, I'm really collecting a culture and to be the guardian of it is a very strong responsibility that I take. I try to let it be seen...I show a lot of the artworks in a lot of museums because I want a lot of people to see it and so do the artists.” Joe estimates that works from his collection have been in over twenty exhibits including the “Arte Caliente” show at at the South Texas Institute for the Arts and at the National Hispanic Cultural Center, a recent exhibit of Peter Saul's work for a retrospective, another recent exhibit of John Hernandez's sculptures for an installation called “Zoe's Room” at the San Antonio Museum of Art, as well as upcoming exhibits of Kathy Vargas' photographs in Minneapolis and Louis Jimenez works on paper at the Oklahoma City Museum.
Kathy Vargas, Este Recuerdo Series. 2003 Gelatin silver print. 22" x 17"
When it comes to curators, Diaz looks at what they've done in the past and seeks out those who share his aesthetic, According to Joe, “I look for someone who really loves their work, and is not going through the motions...one of my biggest concerns is that its not a thrown up show.....I also want an educational component because that's the idea behind an art museum...its to educate the public.”
As for his collecting philosophy, Diaz's says, “Ya know, my idea is to just get the best work that I possibly can. Ya know, a lot of people think that I just collect Latino or Mexican American artists, but that's not true. I have a very wide diversity in my collection---people like Peter Saul, Sharon Kopriva, Mel Chin, Louis Jimenez, Lloyd Walsh....so it's a very broad range...My idea is to just try and get the best work out. Even though I do collect more Mexican-American artists, I'm trying to fill in gaps in that collection to make sure that it is very well-rounded. But overall, I love art. I mean I can go to any museum, see any type of work and there are so many types of work I do love.” Joe acquires work through galleries and directly from artists themselves. While he prefers to collect established mid-career artists with whom he's personally acquainted like Ceasar Martinez or Alex Rubio, Joe also likes to purchase works by up and coming younger artists like Vincent Valdez.
Joe credits his mother with starting him off collecting as she was a big collector of religious works like retablos and silver. But later in life, he came under the influence of other collectors like, not coincidentally, Gilbert M. Denman, Jr. According to Diaz, “If you look at Gib Denman, while he had such a fantastic collection of antiquities, he collected a lot of other different things. The one thing you could look is what Gib collected was always the best. He had Diego Rivera and Greek coins, Roman vases, you name it, but then he also had modern art that was always top of the line. Another one I always looked up to was Dr. Barnes. I was really impressed with him because he was about collecting works that he loved even though there were a lot of people at the Philadelphia
.Museum of Art who didn't think much of what he was collecting, but he felt such a strong affinity towards it and that always impressed me.” I couldn't help but smile a little at this Barnes reference given Joe's own somewhat notorious disposition and idiosyncratic tastes. That being said, being idiosyncratic myself, I like that disposition and tend to share those tastes.
As for what advice Joe Diaz would offer to artists, its pretty simple really, “Make good art, be serious about what you are doing and develop your own style and ideas.” I couldn't have said it any better.
