Sod Buster
1989, Colored pencil
on paper, 30"x40"
collection:
Albuquerque Museum, Albuquerque, NM
Luis Jiménez, Born 1940, El Paso, Texas
Luis Jiménez father came to Texas with the Artist's grandmother in the 1920s; the artist's mother was born here to Mexicans who fled the revolution. Jiménez recalls a strong tradition of craftsmanship on both sides of the family. His maternal grandfather found work in the United States as a finish carpenter; his paternal grandfather had been a glassblower. His father became first a sign painter and eventually the proprietor of a firm in El Paso known for neon "spectaculars," enormous lighted signs that have become the emblems of shopping centers and Las Vegas hotels.
Jiménez began working with his father when he was about six years old. One of the first projects he helped with was a white concrete and neon polar bear for a dry-cleaning establishment. At sixteen, he assisted with two ten-foot crowing red roosters (one of which he still owns) for a chain of drive-in restaurants. His work with his father was very important in providing both a vocabulary of popular images and a foundation in commercial techniques; by the time he was sixteen, Jiménez could weld, spray-paint, blow glass, and work tin.
After graduating from high school, the artist went on to study architecture, first at the University of Texas at El Paso, then the University of Texas at Austin. He increasingly gravitated toward sculpture and drawing; after four years of a five-year program, he changed his concentration from architecture to art, receiving a B.S. in art in 1964.
By this time he had married, and he and his wife spent three months in Mexico City, to which Jiménez had traveled ostensibly to study art. But, he says, the trip was more of a pilgrimage, serving to strengthen pride in his Mexican roots and to affirm his commitment to figurative art--which he saw in Mexico City's murals and which he knew had no place in the then-dominant American style, Abstract Expressionism.
Jiménez and his wife settled in El Paso for a year, where he taught junior high school art classes and where his daughter Elisa was born. Shortly after, driving with a friend to Canada, his car went off a cliff in Idaho, resulting in an accident that temporarily paralyzed him from the chest down. He spent nearly a year recovering, after which he returned to Austin, where his wife got a commercial art job while he struggled to launch his own career. Spurred by a combined sense of frustration and ambition, Jiménez left Austin--and his family--for New York in 1966. The move ultimately resulted in divorce. He took a job in the city recruiting children--mostly Puerto Rican--for the Headstart Program and, later supervising Youth Board activities in Hispanic neighborhoods.
Jiménez stayed in New York for five years, a period that saw his emergence as a mature artist. He worked briefly as a studio assistant to Seymour Lipton, then began producing the figurative works in painted fiberglass that have become his signature. He made the rounds of dealers, showing slides of his work, but failed to attract attention. So one day he loaded three of his sculptures on the back of a truck and, finding the Castelli Gallery empty and its director, Ivan Karp, nowhere in sight, carried the pieces in and set them up in the gallery. Karp was taken aback, but impressed with the work; he suggested that JimŽnez try the Graham Gallery--which gave him his first solo exhibition in 1969 and a second in 1970.
In 1971, Jiménez returned to El Paso and started working in a building at his father's sign company. A third solo exhibition in New York, with Karp at his new gallery, O.K. Harris, had not been a financial success, and Jiménez was left without the resources to work on the scale and with the materials he wanted. He interested oil man and art patron Donald Anderson in his work, who invited him to Roswell, New Mexico, providing him with work space, living quarters, and some financial assistance. Jiménez remained in Roswell for about six years and produced the progress sculptures which depict southwestern images and which are larger and more complex in format than anything he had previously attempted.
The tendency toward larger scale and greater complexity became more pronounced as the 1970s progressed and as Jiménez worked on public commissions. In 1977 came Vaquero, a classic Mexican image for a Chicano neighborhood in Houston; the same year he began work on Sod Buster for Fargo, North Dakota. Several others are in progress, including Southwest Pieta for Albuquerque, Howl--a coyote--for Wichita State University, and a steelworker for the Niagara Frontier Transportation Authority, Buffalo.
Jiménez has continued to show in museums and galleries, including solo exhibitions at the Long Beach (California) Museum of Art (1973); the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston (1974); the Museum of New Mexico, Santa Fe (1979); the Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha (1980) ; the Laguna Gloria Art Museum, Austin (1983); and the Alternative Museum, New York (1984). Among group exhibitions that have featured his work are "Human concern/Personal Torment," Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1969); "Recent Figure Sculpture," Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge (1972); "Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary American Art," Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1973); "Dalé Gas: Chicano Art of Texas," Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston (1977-79); "The First Western States Biennial Exhibition," Denver Art Museum and tour (1979-80); and "Showdown," Alternative Museum, New York (1983). The Latin American Spirit: Art and Artists in the United States, 1920 - 1970, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York, 1988. He received the Hassan fund Purchase Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (1979); and an Environmental Improvement Award from the American Institute of Architects in Houston (1982).
Jiménez returned from Roswell to El Paso for several years. He now lives with his present wife, Susan, and their young son, Adán, in Hondo, New Mexico, a small community in the mountains west of Roswell, where Jiménez has converted an old school into a studio and living quarters.
Source: Hispanic Art in the United States: Thirty Contemporary Painters and Sculptors, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 1987.
