Luis Jiménez, “American Dream”

by David S. Rubin

Matthew Marks Gallery, Los Angeles, California

Continuing through November 8, 2025

Luis Jiménez, “American Dream,” 1966, cast fiberglass and automotive paint with epoxy coating, 20 x 29 x 35”. All images courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, Los Angeles.

Luis Jiménez (1940-2006) may be best known as the only Mexican American artist associated with New York Pop art in the 1960s, or maybe for the many controversies surrounding his public art later on. But this survey reveals what Jiménez really should be best remembered for: his role as a political satirist and a champion of the Latinx working class. In his early sculptures and drawings the El Paso Chicano was already making pointed commentary on American culture. In later works, he celebrated the gritty, energetic atmosphere of border life.

The son of an illegal immigrant who was a neon sign maker, Jiménez learned as a child to work with industrial materials such as fiberglass. During his teenage years, he also spray-painted hot rods. As a young artist he took advantage of his skills and turned to casting fiberglass sculptures. He painted them in several colors of automobile paint and often coated it all with epoxy. Although produced during the same time that the SoCal Finish Fetish artists were using similar materials to create monochromatic, minimal forms that affect one’s perception of physical space, Jiménez’s polychromatic works instead emphasize narrative and are sexually suggestive.

Luis Jiménez, “Tank – Spirit of Chicago,” 1968, cast fiberglass and automotive paint, 18 ½ x 35 7/8 x 30”.

In “American Dream” (1966) and “California Chick” (1968), which were created during the height of the sexual revolution, voluptuous nude females are shown fornicating with a Volkswagen and a unicycle. While the eroticism of these works could be considered a metaphor for the thrill of drag racing or speeding along open highways, the imagery more importantly serves as a biting response to consumer and media culture and the straight White male’s American dream of making it with buxom sex goddesses adorned in lipstick and heavy eye-shadow. These “biker chicks” parallel the sexualized women of Tom Wesselmann’s Pop paintings, while the slightly angular geometry of their faces is influenced by iconic Mexican muralists Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco.

Luis Jiménez, “Rodeo Queen,” 1972, cast fiberglass and automotive paint with nylon hair, 48 x 45 x 23”.

Jiménez created two of his most overtly political works in 1968, at the height of the anti-Vietnam War movement. A direct response to the televised police attacks on protesters at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, “Tank-Spirit of Chicago” depicts the splayed bodies of people of color wrapped around a tanker truck that has flattened them. For “The Bomb”, he merged the bulbous blonde hair and breasts of one of his characteristic temptresses with the billowing clouds of an atomic explosion.

In the 1970s, Jiménez turned to the subject of the rodeo. In keeping with the tenor of his earlier work, the excitement of horsemanship is represented as orgasmic. The woman riding a rocking horse decorated with a rainbow in “Rodeo Queen” (1972), a dark-haired Latina, straddles the saddle alluringly while staring at its distinctively phallic horn. A slightly different tone, yet no less ecstatic, is seen in “Vaquero” (1978), where a Mexican cowboy commandeering a bucking bronco raises his right arm in a gesture of triumph. Jiménez once noted proudly that it was “Mexicans (who) developed just the whole notion of being cowboys.”

Robust energy is also on display in Jiménez’s portrayals of honky-tonk and fiesta dancers from the 1980s, as well as in his studies for his last public sculpture “Mustang”, a representation of a wild horse with piercing red eyes and posed in an excited rearing position. In “Honky Tonk (diptych)” (1981), a life-size, freestanding sculpture made by mounting oil pastel drawings on board, a man and woman engaged in a lively barroom dance are presented as in a stop-motion freeze-frame, their bodies animated by the gestural drawing that describes them. Similarly, vigorous drawing and brushwork, combined with bold color, suggests a sexual tension between the partners performing the traditional Mexican hat dance in “Fiesta Dancers (Jarabe)” (1989), a large-scale drawing that was one of many studies for another public artwork.

Luis Jiménez, “Honky Tonk (diptych),” 1981, oil pastel on paper mounted to board, left figure: 77 x 40 x 3 inches; right figure: 76 ¾ x 48 x 3”.

The two lithographic studies for “Mustang” (1993, 1997) are equally bold and expressive, yet they feel particularly ominous in light of the fact that in 2006, while Jiménez was working on his “Blue Mustang” commission for the Denver International Airport, a section of the sculpture fell on him, fatally severing an artery. Completed by his sons and studio assistants, the 32 foot-tall sculpture remains controversial due to its unnatural color, scale and ferocity. Some have perceived it as demonic. Nevertheless, the imagery seems an appropriate monument to the artist himself, who remained fearless and steadfast in his vision of the Latinx community as strong, proud, exuberant, and defiant, qualities more necessary than ever in our current political climate.

David S. Rubin is a Los Angeles-based curator, writer, and artist. As a curator, he has held positions at MOCA Cleveland, Phoenix Art Museum, Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans, and San Antonio Museum of Art. As a writer he has contributed to Art and Cake, Art in America, Arts Magazine, Artweek, ArtScene, Fabrik, Glasstire, Hyperallergic, and Visual Art Source. He has published numerous exhibition catalogs, and his curatorial archives are housed in the Smithsonian Archives of American Art. 

For more information: www.davidsrubin.com.