Museums & Galleries in Converse

Since its inception 25 years ago, Blue Star Contemporary Art Center continues to fill San Antonio’s contemporary art void, gaining attention from visitors and artists around the world and a spot on San Antonio magazine’s Best of the City 2011 list. A family membership bestows a wealth of benefits to patrons, including 10% off at applicable area restaurants, 10% off Blue Star merchandise, and entrance to exclusive openings, lectures, and black-tie water-gun battles. Discover an ever-rotating and ever-innovative lineup of exhibits including Four Decades with Colour—running until mid-February—which billets more than 20 pieces by sculptor-painter Philip King. Meanwhile, Untitled showcases works by British abstract sculptor and Texas convert Philip John Evett. Form and structure reign supreme at the center, which displays an arsenal of abstract forms that guests can circle, study, and recreate with mashed potatoes during dinner.

Named San Antonio's Best Museum in the 2010 Nickelodeon Parents' Choice Awards, San Antonio Children's Museum has ushered more than two million guests through its educational wonderland since opening in 1995. Tykes can explore permanent exhibits such as Science City, with hands-on exhibits covering physics, engineering, and how to extract highlighter ink from lightning bugs. In PowerBall Hall, children man simple machines to send orbs up to a lofty cage until the chamber fills and unleashes a spherical torrent down upon the delighted little ones. Other exhibits impart lessons of financial responsibility and proper nutrition in a make-believe bank and market. Membership is calibrated for any permutation of the family unit, and grants amenities including unlimited visits for a year, a subscription to the museum newsletter “Spark!,” and access to more than 40 classes where kids can submit theses on baking-soda volcanoes for peer review.

Founded in 1954 and featured in the Wall Street Journal, the McNay Art Museum rests on the 23-acre estate of the late art collector Marion Koogler McNay and boasts a collection of nearly 20,000 works of early and modern art, as well as the New Image Sculpture exhibit (running until May 8) and Sandy Skoglun's installation The Cocktail Party (running until May 8).

Albert Friedrich poured the first foamer at The Buckhorn Saloon in 1881. Early in his bartending days, Friedrich began accepting horns and antlers in exchange for whiskey and beer, leading to a unique collection now exhibited in The Buckhorn Museum. The historic tavern claims that Teddy Roosevelt once recruited Rough Riders from among its patrons, and it is also rumored as the place where Pancho Villa plotted the Mexican Revolution. An original handcrafted marble-and-cherry-wood back bar and other historic furnishings still reside in the saloon, where guests now swig locally brewed beers and challenge each other to taser duels. Visitors come face to face with the taxidermal heads and other artifacts from more than 520 species, including a 1,056-pound black marlin and a prehistoric irish-elk skull and antlers. The museum also lays claims to a preserved whitetail deer and the rattlesnake rattle artwork of Friedrich’s wife, which guests can show to their own pet snakes as a cautionary example of what happens to misbehaving reptiles.

Adjacent to The Buckhorn Museum, The Texas Ranger Museum houses Texas Ranger paraphernalia such as sawed-off shotguns, badges, and photographs. At Ranger Town, young whippersnappers delight in glimpses of life during turn-of-the-century San Antonio, as depicted by a re-created jail, smith, and telegraph office, as well as the Bonnie and Clyde exhibit, where a '34 Ford V8 Deluxe sits anxiously awaiting its next adventure. On their way out, visitors can drop in at a museum gift shop that traces its own origins to 1920, when it was a curios store.

Davis Phillips, the president and general manager of Phillips Entertainment, Inc., carries on the legacy of his father and grandfather, who were both involved in tourism and entertainment. What began as a single attraction has now expanded through partnerships and renovations, though it still manages to thrill audiences with family-friendly interactive exhibits. Phillips Entertainment is active in the San Antonio community and the local tourism industry thanks to its location across from the famed Alamo.

The San Antonio Botanical Garden, which rests on 38 acres, not only dazzles visitors with bright sunflowers and roses, aquatic plants, and a glass display case filled with orchids, but it also teaches them about the local and world flora with informative exhibits. Four large, formal beds showcase seasonally rotating displays, and the Texas Native Trail features representative species from Hill Country, East Texas Piney Woods, and South Texas. Encompassing a wider array of biomes, the Lucile Halsell Conservatory boasts collections of tropical fruits and desert cacti housed within glass buildings that surround the sunken tropical lagoon.

Aside from these exhibits, the botanical garden also hosts summer-camp sessions, school-group programs, and classes for adults as well as children. These programs include lectures and hands-on lessons that discuss local plants and which garden insects are helpful and which are harmful.