[AGL] Re: Luis Jimenez memorialized by Lonn Taylor

[Frances Morey]

Pancho,
  I just got back from a week in West Texas which included an evening and dinner party at the magnificent home of Lonn and Dedie and six of their good friends. Lonn did not mention this article and only spoke of one he is working on for the Desert Cactus, about women gun slingers, expanding on the Annie Get Your Gun theme with the musical now playing at Sul Ross. This is a wonderful article and brought me to tears. I have long been a Luis Jimenez admirer, indeed, worshiper. This is such a tremendous loss for art. 
  There is so much sadness in this decade of being sixty. My lawyer, David Shaw, is in Seton hospital with a stroke, and had another while there. I have so much to lament including the death of Kathy Dubose and Red Ryder, the juggler, who was murdered at the young age 39. He was a high school classmate of my son Gabriel.
  Lonn told of how he learned about the demise of Jack Jackson, at a meeting of the Texas Historical Foundation here in Austin. While out in Fort Davis John Avant told me about an article on the anthropological achievement of my deceased friend, Kay Sutherland, currently featured in the Desert Cactus, the literary magazine for the West Texas region for which Lonn writes a column. I brought back copies for her husband, Jim McCullogh, and daughters, Anna and Eve. There are so many who no longer walk the earth with us and are dearly missed.
  Thank you for sharing this.
  Best,
  Frances
  

Pancho Howze <panchohowze at yahoo.com> wrote:
  The Rambling Boy


by Lonn Taylor 

Flags were flown at half-mast all over New Mexico last
week to honor a Texan, which was odd because Texans
are not generally held in great esteem in New Mexico.
But the artist Luis Jimenez, a native of El Paso, was
an exceptional Texan and an exceptional man. His death
on June 13 will be mourned not only by everyone who
knew him but by everyone who saw and was moved by his
monumental brightly-colored fiberglass sculptures,
like “Lagartos” in the plaza at El Paso. Ironically,
his death was caused by a piece of one of those
sculptures, a 32-foot high rearing mustang, falling on
him as it was being moved from his studio in Hondo,
New Mexico.

I first met Luis Jimenez in El Paso in the early
1980s, when I wanted to borrow his fiberglass statue
“Vaquero” for an exhibit on cowboys that I was doing
for the Library of Congress. I called him from Santa
Fe and told him that I was going to be in El Paso the
following Friday and would like to meet with him to
discuss the loan. He told me that he always reserved
Fridays for a family lunch at a local restaurant with
his father and his sister, but that I would be welcome
to join them and we could go to his studio afterward
and talk about the “Vaquero” loan. 

I felt honored to be included in a family occasion. I
knew that Jimenez’s father had come to El Paso from
Mexico in 1925 by wading the Rio Grande and eventually
became an American citizen and a respected El Paso
businessman, and I knew that he owned a neon sign
factory, which was where his son had first learned
welding and metalworking. Over lunch the elder Jimenez
told me with a shy smile that he considered himself an
artist just like his son, and that his masterpiece was
a multi-colored neon rooster on a fried chicken
restaurant in Las Cruces that bent down to peck at the
ground and then straightened up and threw its head
back to crow.  Luis later told me that when he decided
to drop out of the architecture program at the
University of Texas at El Paso and change his major to
art his father more or less disowned him, and they did
not speak to each other for several years.  However,
when he had his first gallery exhibit in New York in
1967, he received a package from his father. Inside
was a gold watch engraved with the words, “To my son
the artist.” When we left the restaurant that day and
got into Luis’s car to go his studio, Luis lit a
cigarette and said, “You know, I’m 42 years old and a
successful artist and I still can’t bring myself to
light up a cigarette in front of my father.”  His
sculpture, “Border Crossing,” which depicts a man
wading the river with his wife and child on his back,
is a tribute to his father.

Luis was happy to loan “Vaquero” to my exhibit, and
the 16 ½ -foot statue of a Mexican-American cowboy
waving a pistol from the back of blue bucking bronco
looked fabulous in the cold and colorless marble hall
of the Library of Congress’s James Madison Building, a
building so infelicitous that it is known as the box
that the Sam Rayburn Building – universally
acknowledged as the ugliest building in Washington -
came in.  I wanted something that would draw visitors
into the building and let them know that there was an
exhibit about cowboys back in its recesses, and
“Vaquero” filled the bill perfectly. 

Luis was a quiet and gentle person, but his sculpture
seemed to attract controversy. For one thing, he
worked in a non-traditional material, fiberglass
sprayed with acrylic aircraft paint and covered with
several coats of clear polyurethane varnish, which he
felt perfectly suited his subject matter, images drawn
largely from Mexican-American popular culture. He
thought the surfaces of his sculpture replicated the
surfaces  of the lowrider automobiles that had
fascinated him as a young man. For another, some
people found his images threatening, or, in the polite
language of city councils, “inappropriate.”  His
“Vaquero” was rejected by two sites because some
people objected to the cowboy’s pistol. “No one would
dream of taking away Robert E. Lee’s gun or George
Washington’s sword,” he was quoted as saying, “but
somehow a Mexican with a gun is seen as a big threat.”


About the time that I met Luis he was commissioned to
create a sculpture for a park in Albuquerque’s Old
Town, the site of the original 18th-century plaza of
Albuquerque, now surrounded by souvenir shops and
fast-food restaurants catering to tourists.  He
produced a massive fiberglass work called  “Southwest
Pieta,” depicting an Aztec warrior holding the
scantily-clad corpse of an Aztec lady in his arms with
the snowy peak of a volcano rising behind them. The
statue referred to the Aztec legend of the lovers
Popocatepetl and Ixtaccihuatl, who were turned into
volcanoes by the gods, as depicted on Mexican
calendars. But when it was unveiled all hell broke
loose. The city council thought it would offend
tourists; Hispanics who traced their descent from old
Spanish families thought it was “too Mexican”; a rumor
started that it depicted the rape of an Indian by a
Spaniard. Eventually it was moved to a park in a
working class neighborhood called Martineztown, which
suited Luis just fine. He always said that he wanted
his art to be seen by people who couldn’t afford to
buy it. And it can be, because it is in public places
from Houston to Boston to Fargo, North Dakota to the
Smithsonian Institution, a pretty good record for the
son of an illegal immigrant. 
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