Borderlands loses one of the greats

Luis Jiménez who combined borderlands folk arts (neon sign making, wielding and graffitti) with fine arts, was killed yesteday -- ironically, one of his sculputes fell he was working on toppled over and crushed him. He was 65. Very much in the borderlands tradition, Jiménez combined the American tradition (he had formal training, and the academic creditials essential to being taken seriously in the U.S. art world), he was also in the Mexican tradition, where artists -- even the greatest, like Diego Rivera -- are workers, with a creative sense of the material at hand. For Jiménez, traditional forms were those of his native El Paso -- spray paint, auto body fiberglass and a sense of color. He learned his art, not so much in school, but in his father's body shop. New Mexico's Governor Bill Richardson (Jiménez' studio was in Hondo) ordered flags lowered to half-staff in the artist's honor.

Southwest Pieta