Michael Tracy was born in 1943 in Bellevue, Ohio. He studied literature and art at St. Edward’s University in Austin, Texas, and five years later received his M.F.A. in studio art from the University of Texas at Austin. His first museum exhibition, “Seven Gold Paintings,” came in 1971 at the McNay Art Institute. Tracy won early fame with paintings and sculptures—often described as “Baroque” because of their powerful energy—that read like mashups between the corporeal and the spiritual. He refused to play the art-world game, however, and eventually took himself off the grid, working in studios near the Rio Grande, the river that forms the border between Texas and Mexico. “Living on the ‘northern’ edge of the Rio Grande, on what officially is the edge of Latin America, has had immeasurable impact on my life and work,” he said. “I have had a front-row seat in the ongoing drama of two distinct cultures hemorrhaging into each other; the physical migration itself, the cultural nullity, the sociological angst and despair, and the legal miasma.” Tracy died in 2024, at 80. His large-scale assemblages and greatly layered paintings are once more on view at the McNay Art Institute. —Jack Sullivan