San Antonio’s Briscoe Western Art Museum has completed renovations on its River Walk home, and its new centerpiece doesn't just hang on a wall. It is the wall.

The nearly 20-foot LED wall anchors the Valerie Urschel Guenther Four Pillars Gallery, where Beyond the Frontier: Four Pillars of Western Art will be played on a loop. The 14-minute film is built from 85 works of art layered with archival images, narration, music, and animation. The piece blows up details of the works that are easy to miss at their original size.

“Western Art has an extraordinary ability to transport us to another place and time, but there is so much within these works that can be missed at first glance,” said Liz Jackson, President and CEO of the Briscoe, via a release. “Beyond the Frontier gives us an entirely new way to invite visitors into the art.”

The film and the gallery are built around four lenses: Wildlife & The Land; Native People of the Americas; Cowboys & The American Frontier; and Tejanos, Vaqueros, and Spanish Heritage. That latter is the museum's addition to the three lenses Western art has traditionally been viewed through, and it's the one the Briscoe considers essential.

“Three of those pillars will be familiar to anyone who knows Western Art,” said Jackson. “But at the Briscoe, we recognize something essential to understanding the West: there is no cowboy as we know him without the vaquero. Tejano, Spanish and Mexican traditions helped shape ranching, horsemanship and the culture of the West long before the cowboy became an American icon.”

Among the works showcased are Ernesto Icaza Sánchez's “Lassoing Cattle,” Gladys Roldán-de-Moras' “Sunday Riding at Mission San Jose,” and Mark Maggiori's “Once Upon a Time.” Some come from outside collections, so pieces that could never physically hang together share the screen.

Some of the images subtly move using an AI-assisted animation process supervised by the curators. In one of the film's signature moments, the coyote in John Nieto's vibrant “Poised Coyote” slowly comes to life. The museum says the goal was to preserve each work's composition rather than reinvent it, and to send visitors into the galleries to find the originals.

The screen is a Nanolumens LED system — the second of its kind installed in the U.S. It displays more than a billion colors and has a seamless surface that lets landscapes sweep the full width with no interruptions. The resolution is clear for patrons standing as close as about six feet.

The larger museum renovation also adds exhibition space on the first floor of the museum's building. The new Theresa Guenther New Works Gallery and West Gallery now flank the Four Pillars Gallery.

The revamped Women of the West Gallery reopens October 15 with Kathy Sosa: Revolutionary Women of Texas and Mexico, more than 30 works by the San Antonio artist on view through June 14, 2027. The show draws on Sosa's book about soldaderas, saints, and subversives, and it serves as a companion to Tejano Legacy: Another American Origin Story, the largest exhibition in the Briscoe's history.