Growing up in a barrio of El Paso, Texas, Luis Jimenez learned about art by reading books, working in his father's electric and neon sign shop, and visiting museums and murals in Mexico City. When he eventually embarked on a formal study of art in the mid-'60s, Jimenez found reactions to his subject matter less than encouraging.

" 'Oh my God,' people told me. 'Serious artists don't work with cowboys and Indians and little horses and things,' " he recalls, laughing.

Today, the sculptor's mammoth fiberglass depictions of cowboys and Indians have won him national acclaim, including a slot in Texas Monthly's "Texas Twenty," a list of the "most impressive, intriguing, and influential Texans of 1998." One of his "little" horses, a 32-foot-tall mustang in progress, is destined for a prime spot next to the main terminal at the Denver International Airport.

Jimenez began making large-scale public pieces after he "arrived" on the New York art scene of the late '60s. His first one-person exhibition at Graham Gallery in 1969 was a success, and after years of struggling, he was finally able to support himself through his art.

Perhaps because he'd spent his lean years in New York City working in minority youth programs, or because the beloved artists from his childhood were public muralists like José Clemente Orozco, Jimenez wasn't content to succeed within the exclusive realm of private collectors and galleries. "I think there has always been a group of people that responded to my work, but because of the way the art world operates, they probably couldn't afford it," says Jimenez. "With the public pieces, they don't have to buy it. The works are sitting out in a public place."

Working in New York from 1966-72, he drew on East Coast images for his subject matter. But when he returned home to the Southwest, he adopted the symbols of his home region: vaqueros, Indians, farmers, and rodeo queens. These remain his inspiration as he works from his home/studio, a converted schoolhouse in Hondo, New Mexico, which he shares with his wife, Susan, and their three children.

Called "revisionist history," Jimenez's public works aren't designed to create controversy, but they do. Of his most famous work, Vaquero, he says, "The cowboy has a gun because equestrians are always pictured with either their sword or their gun." So Jimenez was surprised when two of the sites for which Vaquero was intended were rejected and replaced with alternate sites because of the vaquero's weapon. The specter of a gunslinging Mexican cowboy, violent and menacing to some, was Jimenez's answer to the traditional military monument. "No one would dream of taking away Robert E. Lee's gun or George Washington's sword, but somehow the thought of a Mexican with a gun is seen as a big threat," he says.

Rewriting history or not, Jimenez's work is an exuberant expression of his own history, of which he says his years at UT were a crucial and formative part. "College was really a great experience for me, because had I not gone to Austin," he says, "I would never have had the kind of exposure to the world that I ended up having."

Luis Jimenez received a UT Distinguished Alumni Award in 1998.

By Rachael Shaw Jones,
excerpted from Texas Alcalde magazine (November/December 1998)

Links:

UT Austin:

• College of Fine Arts

• School of Architecture

• Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art

• Texas Exes (Ex-Students' Association)

• The Alcalde magazine

The Handbook of Texas Online:
http://www.tsha.utexas.edu/

• El Paso, Texas