Luis Alfonso Jiménez Jr. (July 30, 1940 – June 13, 2006) was an American sculptor and graphic artist of Mexican descent who identified as a Chicano. He was known for portraying Mexican, Southwestern, Hispanic-American, and general themes in his public commissions, some of which are site specific. The most famous of these is Blue Mustang. Jiménez died from an industrial accident that took place during its fabrication. It was commissioned by the Denver International Airport and completed after his death.
His most extensive exhibition, a retrospective called Luis Jiménez: Man on Fire, which had 331 works, opened at The Albuquerque Museum in New Mexico in 1994. It was subsequently seen at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.Landis, Moore, et al. (1994). Man on Fire, Luis Jiménez, El Hombre en Llamas, The Albuquerque Museum, Albuquerque, New Mexico. ISBN-13: 978-0826315519 Luis Jiménez: Working Class Heroes: Images from a Popular Culture, another large exhibition, opened at The Dallas Museum of Art in 1997, from where it traveled to other national venues.McHenry, Deni McIntosh. (1997). Luis Jiménez: Working-Class Heroes: Images from the Popular Culture, Kansas City, Missouri: Mid-America Arts Alliance. 1882603052 (ISBN-10)
Education Born in El Paso, Texas, Jiménez worked at a neon sign studio, which was eventually bought by his father. Commencing at a young age, he was introduced to commercial processes, including work on fiberglass bodied cars. At the time, these works were not regarded as art. In his own professional artistic practice, Jimenez, who did not differentiate between high and low art, utilized commercial processes, materials, and finishes, which provoked the ire of art critics.
Jiménez studied art and architecture at the University of Texas in Austin and El Paso, earning a bachelor's degree in 1964. When he changed his major from architecture to art, his father did not speak to him for several years. He completing his post-graduate work at Ciudad Universitaria, Mexico City, D.F., then spent a year teaching in the El Paso school district.
Jiménez moved to New York City in 1966. He also learned much while serving as an assistant to sculptor Seymour Lipton, who he said taught him the professional aspects of being an artist, and who was influential in his use of symbols.
Jiménez won recognition as an accomplished artist and taught art at the University of Arizona and later the University of Houston.
New York City, Roswell, Hondo When Jiménez could not find representation in New York City in 1969, he "devised the guerrilla strategy of occupying a gallery" by installing three of his sculptures without authorization at the Leo Castelli Gallery. They caught the eye of director Ivan Karp, who successfully recommended the Graham Gallery. By the time of his second exhibition at the Graham Gallery, he was successful enough to become a full-time artist, though he decided to move back to Texas in order to make larger works and reach an audience that was broader than that of the gallery and museum.
The critical development in his career came in 1972, when he drove to Roswell, NM with his relatively small, completed sculptures. Jiménez had received no response from Don Anderson, founder of The Roswell Artist-In-Residence Program, to which he had applied, so he drove to Anderson's home. Though Anderson had rejected Jiménez's work when he had reviewed it in reproduction, he was impressed when he saw it in person. Anderson underwrote Jiménez's work at Roswell for six years, enabling him to create his large-scale sculptures. The enormous resources necessary for this work is evident when one considers that the sculpture Progress I required 50 individual molds. With Anderson's support, Jiménez was able to become a public artist. Jiménez, in turn, repaid Anderson with art.
After his one-person show at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston in 1974, Jiménez found an abandoned, former schoolhouse, made of adobe, that had been built by the Works Progress Administration. He transformed it into a home and studio. It was in this studio that he suffered the injury that caused his death.
Critical reception
Hilton Kramer's short review in the New York Times of Jiménez's second show at the Graham Gallery in 1970 significantly advanced the artist's career. Kramer called it "a rather dazzling event... and it establishes him as an artist of remarkable vitality." He added: "There is an animal heat and an erotic energy in his work—in the drawings as well as in the large polychrome‐molded sculptures in fiberglass and epoxy—that fill the gallery in a way that few exhibitions do nowadays." Kramer found its "general spirit" to be "open, robust, and unrestrained."
Critic and curator Lucy Lippard wrote: “Like lava, the gleaming bulk of his work seems caught in the act of flowing, like time or history itself, embodying an exuberance and even excess that is most certainly foreign to postmodern art.” Lippard also observed: “Thanks to its own overwhelming provincialism, New York has hardly ever been sympathetic to regionalism. It took a practiced and maverick eye like Ivan Karp’s in the late ‘60s to see exactly how far out New York could focus and to recognize Jiménez’ Rabelaisian populism as a cousin to Pop art, perhaps even a distant relation to Jackson Pollock’s abstract cowboy esthetic.”
As a product of "both high and popular art," critic Michael Ennis says "Jimenez’s figures combine the classical lines and rapturous Baroque energy of a Bernini with the pneumatic surrealism of Mexican calendar art—a potent mix derived from his own cultural hybridism." Unperturbed by criticism, Jimenez, says Ennis, "simply goes on showing us the true faces of the West—and rewriting nineteenth-century Western mythology for a twenty-first-century audience."
Author Rudolfo Anaya said this of Jimenez: "The kind of medium he used shocked the art world at first. It was called outlandish and garish, but it spoke not only to Hispanics but to the world. In the coming years there will be a school of Luis Jimenez art." On the day of his death, gallerist Adair Margo declared: “I think Luis shared this border region with the world. Those images will continue to live on.... he was a voice that mattered.... a man of just incredible talent, but he also had great generosity of spirit.”
Stuart Ashman, secretary of the New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs, called Jiménez “the most important Chicano artist in the United States.” Curator and critic Ruben C. Cordova says: "Jiménez is one of the few artists since the great Mexican printmake José Guadalupe Posada who has managed to render skeletons as convincingly animate, sentient beings. Nor has any contemporary artist expressed such a resolutely medieval mindset in this endeavor." Michael Agresta calls Border Crossing "the most likely [of Jiménez's sculptures] to stand the test of time and be looked at by future generations as an emblem of our era. Its vertical, totemic composition... is simple and perfect. It captures a timeless vision of a family’s sacrifices and forward-looking hopes. The work would be powerful enough on that level alone, without the added present-day political resonances around ever-larger migrant flows and ever-greater mortality risks faced by families who pursue a better life in the U.S."
Art
Philosophy of Art While he often treated Southwestern themes, Jiménez was more interested in Edward Keinholz than Western artists such as Frederic Remington or Charles Russell. He regarded Keinholz as a Westerner and an outsider, not someone who made "cliché 'Western' art." He did, however, value writers whom he thought had a regional interest, including James Baldwin and William Faulkner, and he felt he was influenced more by writers than by artists.
In terms of artistic subjects, Jiménez says he was "particularly fascinated with sexual symbols," and he frequently depicted women in sexual contexts, often with mythic associations or references. According to Cordova, Jiménez also "cranked out slightly more sublimated female riders in a plethora of Rodeo Queens [mostly works on paper], all of whom ride high in the saddle and wield their breasts like six-shooters."
Jiménez experienced a "shock" in 1980, when he went to Italy and saw animals in ancient sculptures with sacrificial themes that he had used in Progress I. Thus themes he assumed were Mexican or American were revealed to be universal.
Jiménez compared museums to mausoleums, and he affirmed his commitment to public art. Jiménez often took considerable time to devise an appropriate object for a commission, as he did for The Sodbuster: San Isidro, in Fargo, ND. He initially wanted to create a dance piece, but learned that, as Scandinavian Lutherans, the locals did not approve of smoking, drinking, or dancing. As described by the Smithsonian website, "The piece portrays a stout man guiding an ox drawn plow that not only opens up the soil for planting but exposes buried artifacts, from potsherds to a French Canadian oxcart wheel, of former human habitation." Jiménez had discovered potsherds in his own garden, and San Isidro, the Catholic saint of farming, was a medieval Spaniard, so he is synthesizing cultures in this work.
He prefers open spaces, because he doesn't think he can compete with buildings. "Sculpture," he says, "has served for centuries as a way of humanizing urban spaces."
For Jiménez fiberglass, with its "flawless finish" was "a statement in itself, one that can incorporate color and fluid form, the sensuality that I like." He admired Alexander Calder and Julio González, whom he thought made definitive use of their materials.
Sculpture
As a sculptor, Jiménez was known for his large polychromed fiberglass sculptures, often of Southwestern and Hispanic themes. Jiménez's sculptures spread across the United States, many initially outdoors, due to their size. His fiberglass sculptures need periodic refurbishment if they are left outdoors for an extended period, and some have been moved indoors to protect them, including one at the University of Texas at San Antonio.
His sculptures are recognizable due to their themes and the colorful, undulating surfaces the artist employed. The finish of his sculptures had more in common with commercial products than with conventional fine art sculptures. Everyday life was a catalyst for his work, as Jiménez noted: “If I was an outsider looking at America—what would I see? What would I be looking at? It would be the strong and vibrant images that stand out, like the cowboy, not those coming out of the fine-art situation. It would be the motorcycle, the automobile; this is the important visible iconography of America....”
Jiménez's first public commission was Vaquero. He realized that the equestrian was common in the Western tradition. Jiménez notes: "So the challenge became: how can I make people look at it again and how can I do something with my material—fiberglass—that bronze can’t do; that stone can’t; that hasn’t been done before?" At the same time, Jiménez wanted to make a statement about the Spanish and Mexican origins of cowboy culture. He explicitly said he was "redefining an image and a myth," operating out of a new, aggressive spirit, rather than an old deferential one."
When he was six years old, Jiménez spent a summer in Mexico City, where he was impressed by the scale of work by Mexican muralists, including José Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and Diego Rivera. Jiménez specifically stated that he was not very influenced by Rivera. On artistic and thematic levels, he was deeply influenced by Orozco's treatment of fire, for which Jiménez had an affinity, which the artist attributed to his own, Jungian interest in fire as a mythic substance.