TIPSY

On view from November 2025-November 2027, TIPSY is a site-specific installation at the San Antonio Museum of Art by Marisa Morán Jahn that explores the role of art and “spirits” (drinks made from distilled and fermented plants) in shifting perspective and communing with the divine or with others. In the installation, wine-colored paint on the walls of the museum’s principal foyer references the building’s architectural dimensions but rather than remaining upright, it slides off at an angle, spills onto the floor, and creeps around corners. For Jahn, “TIPSY refers to things we thought we knew but turns them on their side. The artwork behaves as if it’s ecstatic, or in an altered state, inviting us to see the museum in a new way.” 

TIPSY draws upon SAMA’s building history as the former Lone Star Brewery along with cross-cultural traditions of imbibing spirits to connect revelry and rituals from around the world to regional history. Jahn, who is based in New York City, was born in Texas to an Ecuadorian mother and Chinese father. Her artwork frequently remixes cultural icons to destabilize fixed ideas about origin and provenance. She explains, “In the way that both art and libations lower inhibitions and forge new connections, TIPSY brings out fascinating histories that shift how we understand ourselves in the world.”   

Across the teetering magenta plane shifting motifs evoke glittering stars in the night sky, the historic patterned façade of San Antonio’s Mission San José, the City’s quatrefoil insignia, and archetypal symbols across time. Floating turquoise bubbles suggest the passage of water across cultures, cosmologies, and political boundaries. Recognized for its fifteen-mile River Walk (or Paseo del Río) and nicknamed River City, San Antonio is defined by the presence of the San Antonio River—known by Indigenous Coahuiltecan communities as Yanaguana (Spirit Waters). The five Spanish colonial missions were established along its banks during the eighteenth century and are now designated UNESCO World Heritage sites. The artesian Edwards Aquifer, bolstered by porous karst limestone, supplies local springs and drinking water. These waters attracted settlers, including nineteenth-century German, Czech, and Austrian immigrants such as beer magnate Adolphus Busch who endeavored to transform San Antonio into a brewing hub.2 Central to the fermentation of grains, fruits, and plants, the installation’s fizzy bubbles also recall carbonated brews—from frothy Mexican pulque (made agave plant sap since precolonial times) to beer in ancient Egypt (associated with the flooding of the Nile) to today’s Lone Star Beer (marketed as "The National Beer of Texas”).