04 - Luis Jiménez, Sod Buster 

Luis Jiménez
American, 1940-2006

Sod Buster
1983
Lithograph
32 x 45.8 inches
Museum Permanent Collection
1989.31

Luis Jiménez, a first-generation American, was born in El Paso, Texas, in 1940. He studied and worked most of his life in the southwest region of the United States and described his roots as being partly in Mexico and partly in Texas.

Jiménez studied art and architecture at the University of Texas in Austin and El Paso, receiving his bachelor’s degree in 1964. After completing post-graduate work at Ciudad Universitario, Mexico City, he moved to New York City, followed by a move back to Texas and Arizona, where he taught both at the University of Arizona and the University of Houston.

While Jiménez was trained to work in metal at his father’s sign shop and his earliest sculptures were in metal, his preferred medium was fiberglass. He is most widely known for his large-scale fiberglass sculptures, where he took a medium most closely associated with cars and appropriated it for making art.  Combining the medium of fiberglass with southwestern themes, Jiménez brought Native American, Chicano, and Mexican figures into his art.

San Isidro, the patron saint of farming, inspired a sculpture he made titled Sod Buster, which was created in 1983. Sod Buster was meant to be a homage to the hard-working farmers and homesteaders who originally settled the land. Ironically, in 1985 the Food Security Act introduced a program titled Sodbuster with the intention of discouraging plowing of erosion-prone grasslands for crops.