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Was Christ Anti American (A Real Pinko)?
The Mexican Election: More Collateral Basura
I ran into a friend at the gym of the local university. He is from Mexico’s interior ( but the north). Smart guy, a brother. The university sits smack dab on the border and looks across to Juarez from El Paso. The university has many Mexican nationals mostly from Juarez but with a significant number of citizens from the interior, a majority of Mexican Americans and a smattering of Anglos. Like many things on the Border, it is physically the United States and pragmatically in Mexico (language, culture, food).
I ask him if he voted in the recent election.
Luis Jimenez Bio
Sculptor; Born July 30, 1940; Died June 13, 2006
Luis Jimenez, a successful but often controversial sculptor, has died after being struck by a falling part of one of his works.
Authorities described the incident as an industrial accident. A segment of a sculpture came loose while it was being moved with a hoist at Jimenez’s New Mexico studio on Tuesday.
It struck the artist, pinning him against a steel support. The 65-year-old sculptor was taken to a hospital, where he was later pronounced dead.
“Luis Jimenez’s loss to the United States, to New Mexico, to the Chicano community, is great,” his friend David Hall told Albuquerque TV station KRQE.
“He was an icon, he was a very famous and well-respected artist. We will dearly miss him.”
Jimenez, a native of El Paso, Texas, was known for his large and colourful fibreglass sculptures that depicted fiesta dancers, a mourning Aztec warrior, steelworkers and illegal immigrants. His work often started arguments and spurred emotions. “It is not my job to censor myself,” Jimenez once said. “An artist’s job is to constantly test the boundaries.” Jimenez’s Vaquero and Plaza de Los Lagartos sculptures became civic landmarks in El
Paso, where he grew up learning to paint and fashion large works out of metal in his father’s sign shop.
“I think Luis shared this border region with the world. Those images will continue to live on,” El Paso art gallery owner Adair Margo said. “You look at the images he left us, and you realise he was a voice that mattered, that
gave form to this region and communicated it with people.”
Jimenez studied fine arts at the University of Texas in Austin and spent time working in New York. In 1969, he created Man on Fire, a sculpture of a man in flames that drew its inspiration both from Buddhist monks in South
Vietnam who burned themselves and the Mexican story of Cuauhtemoc, set on fire by Spanish conquerors. The sculpture was displayed at the Smithsonian Museum.
Jimenez won numerous awards for his work. More recently, he completed a mud casting of firefighters and three fibreglass flames as part of a memorial for Cleveland. He was also working on a piece that was destined for Denver International Airport.
Sculptor; Born July 30, 1940; Died June 13, 2006
REMEMBERING LUIS
Luis Jimenez, Hondo, New Mexico, 2001
Born: July 30, 1940, El Paso, TX / Died: June 13, 2006, Hondo, NM
The first time I met Luis, back in the seventies, he came into my apartment and seemed to fill the room. It was like no room was big enough for him.
He was that big of a g
Not physically, although he was that powerful.
Not spiritually, although he did have that aura of somebody who really sees the bigger picture.
He was just big. All of it. Life. Love. Art. Humor. Seriousness. Ambition. Regular guyness.
When I first met him, and I suspect this is what most people felt upon first encounter, I felt like my life was just a lot more complete than it had been a moment before.
If you wanted to be good at something, in my case it was to be a photographer- you knew he’d be encouraging for your dream.
He was a brother. A big brother. And like a lot of big brothers, he was larger than anyone could possibly be.
And, man, was he smart.
He said what mattered. He lived He cut the crap.
He made impossibly complex Art and made it look like you could buy it from a south side El Paso Body Shop. And the Art mattered. It was about something. It was about him and our culture and his culture and the idiocy of our system and about the flora and the fauna and intuition and magic and love and joy.