Jesus Treviño (December 24, 1946 – February 13, 2023), better known as Jesse Treviño, was a Mexican-born American visual artist. He essentially became a Chicano artist after he was wounded in Vietnam during the Vietnam War, which required him to learn how to paint with his left hand. Based in San Antonio, Texas, his paintings and murals largely depict the Mexican American/Chicano community of San Antonio, including cinemas and neighborhood shops, as well as people. He is best known for his photorealist paintings from the late 1970s and early 1980s, and for his large-scale mosaic murals made out of ceramic tiles, which he produced later in his career.
According to Ruben C. Cordova, curator of his 2009 retrospective at the Museo Alameda, he was beloved as well as famous within San Antonio: "Jesse Treviño was far and away the most famous artist San Antonio ever produced. His renown greatly transcended the art world: he was the hometown hero par excellence. At the same time, Treviño was an important role model for Chicano artists, from the self-taught artist Adan Hernandez (who quit his day job when he saw Treviño's paintings) to RISD alumnus [and now MacArthur fellow] Vincent Valdez (who kept a scrapbook of articles about Treviño when he was a child)." In 2016, restaurateur Jorge Cortez declared: "San Antonio and Treviño are synonymous."
His paintings are in the collections of: the Smithsonian American Art Museum, which has two paintings (Mis Hermanos, 1976 and Tienda de Elizondo, 1993); the San Antonio Museum of Art, which has two paintings (El Alameda, 1980 and Señora Dolores Treviño, 1982); the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum, which owns the artist's youthful portrait of President Johnson; "In 1987, he presented a painting of the Alamo to President Ronald Reagan in the Oval Office," which is now in the Ronald Reagan Presidential LIbrary and Museum; one of Treviño's artworks is also in the George F. W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum.
Biography Jesus Treviño was born on December 24, 1946, in Monterrey, Mexico, to Juan Treviño and Dolores Campos. He was their ninth child. His father was born in Sabinas Hidalgo in 1906, and migrated to San Antonio for work. Dolores was born in 1915, and grew up in New Braunfels. The two met in New Braunfels when Juan was visiting his brothers who lived in that city. The two were married in New Braunfels and lived there until economic pressures and racial tensions compelled the family to undertaken a reverse migration to Monterrey, Mexico. Juan worked as a trucker for construction materials until economic pressures again compelled the family to migrate to the United States, this time to San Antonio, Texas, where the family settled in the West Side neighborhood. This neighborhood had a significant Mexican American population.
Treviño attended and won his first art award from the Witte Museum when he was six years old. He attended Fox Tech High School where a teacher named Katherine Alsup helped him obtain a scholarship in 1965 to study in New York City at the Art Student's League. In 1966, Treviño was drafted into the military to serve in the Vietnam War. He had the opportunity to return to Mexico as a Mexican national, thus avoiding military service, but he chose to enlist and gain U.S. citizenship. Several of his brothers had served in the military, and Treviño would uphold this tradition. He served in the B Co., 39th Infantry, 9th Infantry Division and trained at Fort Riley.Cordova, C., & Treviño, J. (n.d.). Oral history interview with Jesse Treviño, 2004 July 15–16. Archives of American Art. other. He was deployed to Vietnam in December 1966. On February 23, 1967, he was seriously injured while crossing a rice paddy by sniper fire and a booby trap. His femur was shattered and an artery was severed by a sniper's bullet, and the explosion left him with ten shrapnel wounds due to being thrown twenty to thirty feet. As he lay injured, he began to think about what was important in his life; he vowed that if he lived, he would return home to San Antonio and paint his family and community.
"I landed face-down in a rice paddy", Treviño recalled. "My broken right leg was folded over my left leg and my right arm felt like it was on fire. The pain was so great I thought I would die. I remembered all the paintings I had made in my life, and I realized I had just painted whatever my teachers told me to paint. I thought, 'What would I paint if I lived?' I realized I had never painted my mother or my brothers. ... It made me want to survive to be able to paint the things that mattered most to me."
"Immobilized in mud and a pool of his own blood", Treviño expected to die. He was swiftly rescued by a medic and evacuated by helicopter.
Treviño was treated at a military hospital in Japan before being moved to Fort Sam Houston. Treviño's recovery was lengthy, and he would not be able to walk for a year. His right arm, his dominant hand, would eventually be amputated in late 1970. Armando Albarran, a fellow veteran who had both of his legs amputated due to war wounds, encouraged Treviño to paint with his left hand. A portrait of Albarran was the first painting Treviño completed with his left hand.
After leaving the hospital, Treviño enrolled at San Antonio College, where he would earn an Associate Degree in Art in 1970. Particularly under Mel Casas' tutelage, Treviño quickly trained his left hand, first by making highly experimental works in 1969. He soon realized that he could become a fine artist, and not merely a children's art teacher.
Treviño earned a BA in Art from Our lady of the Lake University in 1974, where he studied with Sisters Tharsilla Fuchs and Ethel Marie Corne. He received his MFA from the University of Texas at San Antonio in 1978, where he studied with Leonard Lehrer and Kazuya Sakai.
In December 1970, Treviño made the decision to have his right arm amputated to reduce nerve pain. He would continue to experience phantom nerve pain following the amputation. In December 1971, he joined the Con Safo art group. Members of this group included prominent San Antonio artists Felipe Reyes (the principal founder and a close friend) and Mel Casas, Treviño's former teacher at SAC, who joined the group at the same time. Treviño referred to the group as "a magic circle" in a 1994 newspaper article.
Before he developed his photorealist style, Treviño painted two iconic murals: Mi Vida (197–72) a biographically surreal painting done on his bedroom wall, and La Historia Chicana (1972–74), a 100-foot wrap-around mural done at Our Lady of the Lake. The latter shows development in the direction of photorealism.
In the latter part of the 1970s, Treviño developed his technique, eventually perfecting a photorealist style in 1976–77. Treviño became famous for his outdoor tile mosaics that depicted the Chicano community, culture, and history, as well as the city's Mexican heritage. Over the years he has gained prominence as one of San Antonio's most famous artists, with his mosaic murals serving as virtual landmarks in San Antonio's cultural landscape.
The artist's friendship with George (also known as Jorge) Cortez sustained him through his depressive states. Cortez sent a driver for him every morning, and he gave Treviño a table at his restaurant in Market Square called Mi Tierra, where Treviño held court.
Treviño underwent treatment for cancer in 2021. He died on February 13, 2023, at the age of 76.Legendary San Antonio artist Jesse Treviño passes away after battling throat cancer San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg tweeted: "Jesse Treviño was an American hero. The wounds of the Vietnam war, which took so many of his friends and neighbors from the Westside of San Antonio, never left him, but he used those scars to bring healing to millions of people."
At the time of his death, Treviño still had many major projects that were unfulfilled. As his friend, collector, and advertising executive Lionel Sosa noted: "His 'to-do' list of projects was long. Treviño had a favorite gesture: he would stretch his arms upward and wide, looking much like Jesus Christ. Holding that gesture, he’d look up at the blank wall where he imagined his next mural would live. The design was already in his head. All he needed was the funding."
Art style While studying in New York at the Art Student's League, where Treviño first worked with a live model, his portraits were made in a painterly technique, in emulation of his teacher, the eminent portraitist William F. Draper. He learned to paint with shadows and color, instead of outlines. At SAC, some of his Pop-inspired works were made on shaped surfaces or made to be viewed in non-flat configurations, including Alamo Exit. TIAC (Pontiac), 1969, included the outer grill of a Pontiac GTO to fulfill a course assignment of integrating a real-world item into an art piece. Zapata, 1969, was painted for a Mel Casas assignment that required the depiction of a hero (Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata), an anti-hero (food stamps), and villain (Spiro Agnew) in a single piece.
While he was painting the 36-by-48-inch Los Camaradas del Barrio (1976), the artist came to the realization that his paintings had to be even larger to achieve the effects he wanted. He perfected his photrealist style in the following works: La Raspa (1976), Mis Hermanos (1976), @Body and Fender (1977), Progresso (1977), La Troca En La Calle Commerce (1979), El Alameda (1980), and Señora Dolores Treviño (1982).
Curator Ruben Cordova explains why the photorealist style, which is so arduous to master, appealed to Treviño: "I think initially he was driven to capture something very specific about his neighborhood and his family and his people, and I think in part that's why he did a photo-realist style", Cordova said. "He said he wanted to make work that was intelligible, that everybody could understand, that was universal. And, if he had [a] kind of painterly style, maybe not everybody could understand what he was doing."
While Treviño studied with photorealist professors, and he utilized the standard, photograph-based practices, the rationale for the subjects he depicted was a departure from photorealist norms. The buildings depicted by mainstream photorealists "were not chosen because they were unique, nor because they were somehow central to the life of the city in a distinct manner. Treviño, on the other hand, sought out the most culturally significant buildings, many of which he deemed particularly beautiful. These buildings were important to him and to his friends, family, and ethnic group, especially the Spanish language theaters. If anything, Trevino picked his buildings even more carefully than his human subjects." When he painted a shop window, for instance, it was full of religious statues, and the window reflected several of San Antonio's most famous and highly regarded buildings.
Treviño evolved beyond his photorealist style, which involved replicating a master photograph in paint. His Main Library Mural of 1995 features "visual elements [that] are pieced together out of numerous photographic sources that never existed together in time and space", therefore, it "has more in common with the collage-like Mi Vida than with Treviño's smaller, seamlessly painted photorealist paintings". The Spirit of Healing, his 93-ft. high mosaic mural (1995–97) features 70 different colors of tile, but "the scale and the medium of this work necessitated substantially different effects than the detailed verisimilitude of Treviño's photorealist paintings".
Major works