The San Antonio Museum of Art opened to the public on March 1, 1981, after a $7.2 million renovation converted the former Lone Star Brewery complex into an art museum. The opening followed decades in which the San Antonio Museum Association had housed art alongside history and natural-history collections at the Witte Memorial Museum. By the 1970s, accelerated art collecting and the acquisition of the historic brewery site made a separate art museum viable. The new museum inherited a fine-art base from the Witte and soon expanded through major Asian art donations and the 1985 acquisition of Latin American folk-art collections formed by Nelson A. Rockefeller and Robert K. Winn. Its campus and collection later grew into a broad encyclopedic museum spanning thousands of years and multiple continents.
The opening transformed a disused brewery into one of Texas's major encyclopedic art museums.