Over the past thirty-five years, Luis Jimenez has become one of North America's most celebrated Mexican American artists. Jimenez was born and raised in El Paso, where his family settled after crossing the border in the 1920s. Jimenez worked with his father and uncle in a sign shop where they designed and built electric and neon signs. Fascinated by the elaborate signs and later influenced by hod-rodding friends who customized low-rider cars, Jimenez took his knowledge of welding, spray-painting, and fiberglass fabrication and eventually embarked on a career in art. From the beginning, Jimenez combined popular culture and imagery, Chicano style and political content, and craft with a sophisticated awareness of "high art" technique and imagery.

Jimenez' father sent him to the University of Texas at Austin to study architecture. When he switched to fine arts in his fourth year of study, Jimenez recalls that his father "basically disowned me. He wouldn't speak to me for a couple of years." When he became an art student, the material he gravitated toward was fiberglass. The choice, he says, was "unavoidable", though the material was used only in commercial applications at the time. He learned techniques previously used to make airplane fuselages, racecar bodies, and carnival figurines. The popular appeal rested in large part on the flawless finish it could acquire in expert hands, a quality which was then largely abhorred as an element in the fine arts. This prejudice was challenged when Jimenez and others started to work with fiberglass in the 1960s.

When he finished his art studies, Jimenez set off to Mexico City. "It was really a pilgrimage to a childhood shrine," he says. Earlier family visits to see the sweeping social murals helped him discover the power and possibility of art. Living on a small grant, Jimenez enrolled at Ciudad Universitaria to study under sculptor Francisco Zuniga. He learned important lessons there, though not necessarily about art. "I learned that although I am of Mexican descent, my thinking formed on this side of the border," he says. And, most disappointing, he learned that Mexico City at that time was not a progressive art scene. "Go someplace where ideas are feeding into the system," Zuniga advised him. "Someplace like New York."

He arrived in New York City a few years later, apprenticed to artist Seymour Lipton, and continued to work at his own sculptures. For subject matter he explored the values of a society caught up in money, machines, music, and sex. He used the icons of the 1960s pop culture to deliver the message. Shows at important venues like the Graham Gallery and inclusion in exhibits at the Whitney Museum of American Art spurred his career. At his first show, Jimenez received a gold watch from his father. Engraved inside were the conciliatory words, "To my son the artist." Jimenez had arrived.

At the end of the 1960s, Jimenez turned his attention to the history and culture of the Southwest. Cowboys, honky tonks, and a variety of animals blazed to life in brilliant color in Jimenez' works. Within these Southwestern themes, he also honored the Mexican and Mexican-American contribution to North American culture. In 1971, he moved to Roswell, New Mexico to concentrate on making public sculpture. These monuments paid tribute to ordinary people - the "salt of the earth." Although best known for his Southwestern icons, Jimenez is also a skilled draftsman equally comfortable with the personal and introspective side of human nature. His self-portraits reveal an intimacy not apparent in his monumental work.

Animals have always been a favorite subject for Jimenez. "Animals in the wild reveal truths about ourselves," Jimenez says. "They remind us about a part of ourselves that we often try to hide or have forgotten." Animals have such an impact on regional history that they often become its most recognizable icons. Sculptures, etchings, drawings, and lithographs including Pelican, Raven, and Mustang are featured in this exhibition.

Jimenez also celebrates the uncommon strength and endurance of the common people who have inspired many of his often-controversial public sculpture projects. The artist sees the working class as the unsung heroes on whose back society was built. Several images from his Working Class Heroes series are on display, including Steelworker, Sodbuster, and the sculpture Firefighters.

Jimenez' Honky Tonk and Fiesta Dancers are among the most vivid images he produced in the1980s. Honky Tonk recalls the throbbing music and social melodrama of the Chicano bar scene. Jimenez included himself in many of the scenes, usually as a silent observer, quite apart from the swirl of life around him. Fiesta Dancers portrays a common element in border life. "Anywhere there has been a Mexican presence you have fiestas," Jimenez says.

Jimenez has completed more than 20 commissions, participated in more than 75 solo exhibitions, and has pieces in the collections of numerous museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Chicago Art Institute, and the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C.

Luis Jimenez will give a gallery talk at the Museum on Thursday, October 30 at 6:30 p.m. A reception will follow. Both the exhibition and gallery talk/reception are free and open to the public.