Luis Jimenez, a sculptor whose color-splashed images of swirling dancers, cowboys in motion and the working class made him a controversial and easily recognized international figure in the art world, died Tuesday at his studio in rural Hondo, N.M. He was 65.
The Lincoln County Sheriff’s Office in Carrizozo, N.M., said he died in an industrial accident.
Mr. Jimenez was injured when one of three pieces from a 32-foot-high sculpture being moved from his studio came loose and pinned him against a steel support.
The piece, commissioned by Denver International Airport, depicted a giant mustang and had been in development for nearly a decade, according to Jim Moore, former director of the Albuquerque Museum.
The sculptor’s huge fiberglass objects, depicting Hispanic and Native American dancers and workers with contorted faces and neon-colored, spray-painted clothing, are displayed in public places and museums across the Southwest and the rest of the country.
His work has been featured at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and Whitney Museum of American Art.
The Smithsonian Institution honored Mr. Jimenez’s sculpture “Man on Fire” in 1979, when it became part of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American Art. The work, perhaps his best-known, depicts a man in flames and is based on the Aztec emperor Cuauhtemoc, who was killed by the Spanish. A casting of another of his sculptures, “Vaquero,” which shows a bronco rider atop a shimmering, metallic-blue horse, sits outside the museum.
Mr. Jimenez was born in El Paso, Texas, in 1940. His father owned an electric sign shop, which exposed the future artist to spray painting and welding.
He moved to New York in 1966, returned to New Mexico in the early 1970s and found success.
Recently, he had completed a sculpture of firefighters for the City of Cleveland and was putting the finishing touches on the Denver International Airport piece, Moore said.
“At the height of minimalism in the 1960s, he chose to do something out of fashion,” Moore said.
Rudolfo Anaya, professor emeritus of history at the University of New Mexico, said of Mr. Jimenez: “The kind of medium he used shocked the art world at first. It was first called outlandish and garish, but it spoke not only to Hispanics but to the world. In the coming years there will be a school of Luis Jimenez art.”
