Off the Wall: Unexpected Art at the Museum

Lori Espinoza leads a curated tour through the San Antonio Museum of Art on Tuesday, October 20, from 5:30 PM to 6:30 PM. It's part of the Off the Wall series, a set of docent-led tours that pull from the museum's collections rather than sticking to the usual highlights. Espinoza is a docent at the museum, and this particular walk is one of the tours developed and led by the docent team.

The Off the Wall format is built around looking past the most familiar masterpieces. Instead of the big names everyone knows, the tours focus on the quieter corners of the collection—the overlooked details, the unconventional materials, the small-scale objects, and the unexpected subjects. It's the kind of tour that asks you to slow down and notice the things you'd usually walk right past.

That's a lot of ground to cover, and the museum provides plenty of it. The building itself is a historic brewery along the Museum Reach of the Riverwalk, and inside it holds permanent collections of Egyptian, Greek and Roman antiquities, Asian art, Latin American art, contemporary art, and American paintings. Espinoza will be pulling from across those collections for this one, so you'll likely see things from very different eras and cultures in a single hour.

It's free with museum admission, and tours are limited to 25 participants on a first-come, first-served basis, so if you're planning to join, it's worth getting there a bit early. The tour runs from 5:30 PM to 6:30 PM at 200 West Jones Ave.