In Memoriam: Luis Jimenez

Luis Jimenez Jr. (1940-2006)
Southwest Pieta, 1983
Lithograph, 30" x 44'
Collection of the ASU Art Museum. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Tom E. Meyers.

The ASU Art Museum is saddened to learn of the death of Luis Jimenez on June 20, 2006. He was a powerful and creative force, influencing multitudes of artists and loved by many people — not just Latinos — for his memorializing monuments to workers.

Jimenez was an incredible draughtsman, one of those artists whose every mark conveys rhythm and motion. He drew on envelopes, the proverbial napkins; his notes emblazoned with ideas for figures. He is best known for his sculptures in Fiberglas, a medium that he learned to manipulate while working in his father’s sign shop in El Paso, Texas. For Jimenez, it was the perfect medium, not merely suggesting popular culture, but a part of that culture.

He observed a polyglot world around him, one in which a “Mexican” (anyone who spoke Spanish, regardless of citizenship) was a second-class citizen, or a clandestine worker.

He embraced the images of that space between Mexico and El Paso known as Chihuahuita, the “Second World.” He applied pop-art principles, lifting and uplifting the imagery of the calendars printed and distributed by funeral homes, liquor stores and tortillerias throughout the barrios of Mexico and the United States. One of those images is re-inscribed here as a print and realized as Southwest Pietà, the colossal sculpture placed in the plaza just east of the ASU Art Museum. Jimenez tells defines the piece in his own words:

“The archetypal image is based on the popular Mexican myth of the origin of the two volcanoes Popocatepetl and Ixtaccihuatl in the Valley of Mexico. It’s a Romeo and Juliet story of two lovers turned into volcanoes by the gods: The active one is the grieving man, the dead woman is the dormant one. While the image has its origins in Mexico, it is the most common image, along with the Virgin of Guadalupe, and can be seen on low-rider vans and on restaurant and barrio murals. The elements that are usually depicted with it also have iconographic value in the Southwest and continue to be important to the native community: the woman as a mountain, the rattlesnake, the prickly pear, and the mescal or maguey cactus.”*

Always giving dignity to the worker, and to Latino culture, Jimenez’s works were often misread; too violent, not pretty enough. And, he worked in that most touchy terrain of the art world: public art, where choice is often guided by fear of offending anyone so that the outcome is emotionally tepid — not the temperature for Luis Jimenez. I remember the hullabaloo over Steelworker, the piece he made for the Three Rivers Festival in Pittsburgh. Wanting to pay homage to steel workers, he originally called the piece Bohunk, what the local workers fondly called themselves. Unfortunately, the commissioning organization interpreted it as a slur. Where Jimenez meant to offer acceptance and to acknowledge the self-definition of a marginalized group, he was forced to give in to political correctness.

Jimenez announced himself with a laugh that filled a convention hall and a wingspread that embraced whoever and whatever was near. He was larger than life and he will be missed.

-- Marilyn A. Zeitlin
Director, ASU Art Museum

Luis Alfonso Jimenez, Jr. (1940-2006) was born in El Paso, Texas, and died in his studio in Hondo, New Mexico.

*From the dedication of Southwest Pietà, Arizona State University, May 12, 1994.