Artist Jesse Treviño documents cultural institutions of San Antonio
By Anthony Head
Driving northbound on I-35 through downtown San Antonio
affords a clear view of the city’s Christus Santa Rosa Children’s Hospital,
where a nine-story, tiled mural called Spirit of Healing features an image of a
young boy holding a dove while an angel watches over him. For San Antonio
artist Jesse Treviño, who completed the mural in 1997, the intricately tiled
artwork expresses a simple and enduring sentiment.
“The dove represents life, and the spirit of life,” says
Treviño. “We must take care of that child—all children—and guide them as they
grow older. Also, the guardian angel has part of her wing broken, which
represents that you don’t have to be perfect. The message is simple and
symbolic.”
Treviño, 65, is internationally lauded for his realist
paintings and his public artworks representing the history and cultural
institutions of Mexican Americans. More than 40 years ago, after losing his
right arm (originally his painting arm) in Vietnam, he first looked home to San
Antonio to inspire his recovery. To a great extent, his life’s work since then
has been dedicated to honoring the generations who struggled before him; and
through his public art, he has never stopped giving back to the West Side
neighborhood that serves as his muse.
Born in 1946 in Monterrey, Mexico, Treviño moved with his
family first to New Braunfels before settling west of downtown San Antonio when
he was four. “When I was a child,” he says, “I would walk to Crockett
Elementary School and re-imagine the houses as I passed, thinking, ‘What would
I do to this house to make it beautiful?’”
Treviño is known for his realist paintings and his public artworks representing the history and cultural institutions of Mexican Americans.A few years later, the Witte Museum held a wildlife-drawing
contest, and six-year-old Treviño entered and won an award, basking in the
attention it afforded him (which was hard to come by in a family of 12 brothers
and sisters). Encouraged by his teachers and family, he began pursuing
opportunities to hone his artistic skills, eventually earning scholarships to
both the Chicago Art Institute and to the Art Students League in New York.
Relatives in the Bronx agreed to let Treviño live with them, so in 1966 he
entered art school.
And then came his draft notice.
“I have to admit, I didn’t know a lot about Vietnam,” he
says. “But I had four brothers who had been in the service, though not in
Vietnam. I thought going was the right thing to do,” he says.
After serving three months in the Mekong Delta, Treviño was
struck by shrapnel and a sniper’s bullet along his right side, severing a nerve
in his right arm. As he lay bleeding, waiting for either help or death, he says
he felt his first impulses to honor and preserve his family, his neighborhood,
and his culture through his artwork.
Treviño was awarded the Purple Heart and spent two years
rehabilitating, but his right arm was eventually amputated below the elbow. Although
initially he despaired at the loss of his arm, his family encouraged him to
enroll in San Antonio College, where he learned to draw and paint with his left
hand and earned an associate’s degree.
Treviño’s recovery coincided with the emergence of Chicano
artists and intellectuals in San Antonio and other cities across the country.
Treviño took (and still takes) great pride as a member of that movement, and
while earning a bachelor’s degree in art from Our Lady of the Lake University,
his reemergence as an artist took the form of his first public mural. Completed
in 1974, La Historia Chicana is a striking, four-sided work spanning six
centuries of Mexican-American heritage. Originally painted on the walls of the
student union building, it’s now prominently displayed inside the university’s
Sueltenfuss Library.
“Like many other artists of his era, Treviño actively sought
to explore, affirm, and represent Chicano or Mexican-American culture that had
been devalued in the larger society,” notes E. Carmen Ramos, Assistant Curator
for Latino Art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. “What
is fascinating about Treviño is how he blended these political and cultural
concerns with a visual style that is associated with the larger American movements
of pop art and photorealism.”
“After Vietnam,” Treviño says, “I had a reawakening and
began to appreciate the beautiful things that were in my community and ready
for me to paint. Like many Chicano artists, I was interested in my roots. There
is so much here that I could work the rest of my life and never capture it
all.”
For instance, Treviño painted the classic cars, street
vendors, and corner businesses that once populated the neighborhood where he
grew up and still lives. Many of those works are held in private collections
and museums, like the San Antonio Museum of Art and the LBJ Library and Museum
in Austin. In 1994, the Smithsonian American Art Museum inducted two of his
paintings into its permanent collection. The following year, the San Antonio
Museum of Art honored Treviño with a one-man show, and in 2009, San Antonio’s
new Museo Alameda hosted a retrospective of his work.
But numerous original works of art by Jesse Treviño can be
viewed outside a museum setting (see sidebar). “When you travel through San
Antonio’s West Side, you’ll see many beautiful works of public art,” says
Arturo Almeida, art specialist for The University of Texas at San Antonio and
curator of the school’s art collection. “The mural at the Wells Fargo Bank is
one of his most beautiful works. And it shows that what’s important to Jesse
Treviño is capturing Mexican culture and Latin-American culture at the heart of
the West Side.”
One of Treviño’s current projects, La Ofrenda, is a
130-foot-tall, steel-and-epoxy veterans’ monument commissioned by the City of
San Antonio, which will be installed at Elmendorf Lake at Our Lady of the Lake
University. Treviño estimates its completion in 2013 and says that it will
express a simple and enduring sentiment: “Service and sacrifice are not
forgotten.”
From the January 2012 issue.
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