John Sherrill Houser - American painter and sculptor.

Winter 08 Cover Spread.indd 1Winter 08 Cover Spread.indd 1 10/3/2008 11:46:59 PM10/3/2008 11:46:59 PM

Win

ter 2

008

Sculptural

Creative Process 39Fine Art Mold Making by Jill GoodpastureArtful Business 46Public Art – Is It For You? by Reno CarolloInspiration 50The Biggest Gift You Never Wanted by Rekha Ohal Past Revisited 52Luca della Robbia’s CANTORIA by M. J. ShahLiterary Pearls, Book & DVD Reviews 56The Artist’s Guide to Public Art by Lynn BasaRunaway Girl: Louise Bourgeois, by Jan Greenberg, Sandra JordanThe Last Word One Artist’s Journey 82Architectural Elements Inspire Sculpture by Nancy DeCamillis

Pursuit

8William Mueller

and the Evolution of a Public Sculpture Projectby Marilyn Noble

16John Houser and THE EQUESTRIAN

by Jonathan Noble

24Bärbel Dieckmann

Classics with Contemporary Relevance by Sandy Allie

34Kunihiko Nakano

A Japanese Sculptor Inspired by American Jazz by Nancy DeCamillis

34

24

16

39

52

Winter 08.indd 5Winter 08.indd 5 10/3/2008 11:27:56 PM10/3/2008 11:27:56 PM

John Houser THE EQUESTRIAN&

Sculptor John Sherrill Houser and assistant sculptor Ethan Taliesin Houser stand beneath THE EQUESTRIAN after its installation in El Paso. Photo courtesy of Jody Schwartz.


Sculptural Pursuit 17

Cities have always used art as a means of boosting their images among citizens and visitors. But where there is public

art, there are bound to be those who don’t like it or, worse, fi nd it offensive. In 1985, the City of El Paso, Texas, began to look for ways to make its downtown area more appealing. Feeling that increased tourism would revitalize its lackluster economy, the city announced that it would accept proposals for projects that would draw new visitors. After hearing of the city’s request, renowned monumental sculptor John Sherrill Houser, whose father Ivan Houser was fi rst assistant to Gutzon Borglum on Mount Rushmore, submitted a proposal that would turn into a fi ercely-debated public art project. At the center of the debate was Houser’s monumental sculpture THE EQUESTRIAN, the largest equine sculpture in the world.

The XII Travelers

El Paso sits on the northern side of the Rio Grande River – the dividing line between the United States and Mexico – and it’s there for a reason. Near El Paso, a natural ford in the Rio Grande has been a major crossing point for people who have shaped the history of the southwestern U.S. throughout the centuries. Because it acts as one of the few gateways in a barrier that divides the continent, the ford has become known as El Paso del Norte, or the Pass of the North.

Houser was intrigued by the history of the Pass of the North, so he proposed a project that would refl ect the importance of the region. “You have this tremendous cavalcade of historic fi gures who came through the area,” he says. “The history of the Pass of the North is incredible. It was the funnel through which the greater parts of the Southwest were settled.” Houser called his project The XII Travelers, and it was made up of twelve monumental bronze sculptures of notable fi gures in the history of El Paso. “I wanted to take twelve different historical eras and choose somebody from each one of those eras to act as sort of a chapter heading for that period. The city really liked the idea of making a downtown sculpture walk of their history,” says Houser.

by Jonathan Noble

When Cultures Collide:

A Cautionary Tale of History & Public Art

John Houser builds an armature for THE EQUESTRIAN maquette.

Houser sculpts the head of Don Juan de Oñate. Unless otherwise noted, photos courtesy of The XII Travelers Committee


Despite initial enthusiasm from city offi cials, the project fell into limbo for several years while Houser and the city tried to gain recognition for it. El Paso is a relatively poor city, and some felt that the money would be better spent on programs that would benefi t its citizens more immediately. “There were people who thought that it was too big for El Paso, and we overcame them by developing a base support in the citizens of El Paso,” Houser refl ects. After several years, The XII Travelers gained enough support among the citizens of El Paso to get the go ahead. The City Council formed a committee to oversee the project, and, in 1992, Houser fi nally got a contract to begin work on the fi rst two monuments, with one caveat: the city retained the authority to decide on the subjects of the sculptures.

The fi rst subject chosen by the city was Fray Garcia de San Francisco, who represents the Spanish mission-building period from 1598-1740. Fray Garcia, whose twice-life-size sculpture was completed and installed in 1997, was a Franciscan monk who built the fi rst Spanish mission in El Paso, today the oldest standing building in the region. The second subject

chosen by the City of El Paso, Don Juan de Oñate, created a fi restorm of protest from the area’s Native American community that has sparked a nationwide discussion on the power and role of public art.

Don Juan de Oñate

Don Juan de Oñate was a Spanish noble born in Mexico who, in 1598, led an expedition to settle and colonize land north of the Rio Grande, now New Mexico, for the Spanish king. After months of traveling across the deserts of northern Mexico, Oñate and his party arrived at the Rio Grande. They crossed the river at the ford, dubbed by Oñate El Paso del Norte, which became the namesake for the city of El Paso. They celebrated their successful arrival in New Mexico with a Thanksgiving feast and then continued north into the territory of the Pueblo Indians, eventually founding the city of Santa Fe. Oñate became the province’s fi rst governor.

For the duration of the journey, Oñate’s party relied on the guidance and assistance of the natives, but once Oñate claimed the land for the King of Spain, the relationship became strained. Oñate sent his nephew,

18 Sculptural Pursuit

Houser atop the model of THE EQUESTRIAN. Houser in front of the model of Oñate’s head and torso.



Juan de Zaldivar, to the Acoma Pueblo, located between modern-day Albuquerque and Gallup, New Mexico, to request rations. The Acoma resisted because the request would have depleted their winter food supply, and tensions soon gave rise to violence. In the ensuing skirmish, Zaldivar was killed along with several other Spaniards.

Oñate reacted fi ercely to news of the violence. He sent troops to the Acoma Pueblo with orders to destroy the town and bring back all the survivors. Cannon-wielding Spanish troops arrived at the Acoma mesa on January 21, 1599, destroying most of the village and massacring hundreds of its people. All survivors were taken to the Santa Domingo Pueblo to stand trial. Oñate ordered that all the Acoma men of fi ghting age were to have one foot cut off, while most of the women and children were sold into slavery. Some survivors escaped back to the pueblo, which is today one of the oldest continuously inhabited villages in North America. Word of Oñate’s brutality made it back to Mexico City, and he was eventually called back to stand trial for his treatment of the Native Americans and colonists. He was convicted and eventually returned to Spain in hopes of clearing his name. Later he was pardoned for his crimes, but he left a dual legacy of exploration and violence in the Americas.

Oñate torso is hoisted onto THE EQUESTRIAN.

Houser in his Mexico City enlarging studio with the model of THE EQUESTRIAN.



THE EQUESTRIAN

When city offi cials in El Paso decided on Oñate as the subject of the second monument in the XII Travelers series, it was clear to most people that confl ict would ensue. Oñate’s legacy is a point of contention between ethnic groups in the Southwest – some see him as a hero who brought Spanish culture to the area; others believe he was a monster who brought genocide and slavery to the Native Americans. “They made that selection, and we knew it was a very controversial choice,” says Houser. “If we had had seven or eight of those statues up when Oñate was selected, there wouldn’t have been so much controversy

about it because people would’ve had a better idea of what these people were doing.”

Nevertheless, Houser decided that using Oñate as the subject was in keeping with the mission of The XII Travelers, so he began work on the sculpture in 1997. “The history is not black and white. I’m not defending Oñate in any way, but he was a typical representative of Imperial Spain,” he says. So he began researching Oñate’s physical appearance and wardrobe, as well as that of the horse he would have ridden. Houser’s research took him throughout the Southwest and to Spain, where he studied the family traits of Oñate’s descendants. An Andalusian stallion named Helicon,

whom Houser met on a ranch near El Paso, became the model for Oñate’s horse.

Once he completed the research phase, Houser built a thirty-three-inch maquette of Oñate on a rearing stallion, brandishing La Toma, the decree that claimed New Mexico for Spain. With the maquette complete, Houser needed to create an enlarged model to be molded and cast. He decided to enlarge the maquette to more than four-and-a-half-times life size – or thirty-six feet tall. “I wanted to give El Paso a record, and I wanted to do a really great piece. I felt that the monumentality of it demanded that it be of extremely high quality,” Houser says.

Installation of THE EQUESTRIAN. Photo courtesy of John Houser.



Unable to fi nd a large enough studio space in or around El Paso to accommodate the giant sculpture, Houser found an unfi nished studio in Mexico City where he and his son Ethan – the assistant sculptor on the project – could enlarge the maquette to make the full-scale model. The enlargement process, which was done without the help of computer enlargement programs, began while the studio was still being constructed and took fi ve years to complete. Thousands of minute measurements were taken by hand before building began. Houser and his staff created the model by constructing wire armatures in sections, then welding them together and covering them with burlap, plaster, and clay.

Houser’s time in Mexico City was plagued by problems with his health and fi nances, litigation with the studio builder, and even a car accident that miraculously spared the original maquette. Dangerous working conditions became commonplace. “We were working

up thirty-fi ve and forty feet on scaffolding, so there were a lot of close calls. It was amazing that no one got killed,” he recalls. During that time, Houser met fi lmmaker Cristina Ibarra who, with John Valadez, would spend seven years following Houser and his sculpture for their documentary, The Last Conquistador, which aired on PBS this past summer.

When the full-scale model was fi nished in 2002, it was sent in pieces to the Shidoni Foundry in New Mexico where the molds were built and the pieces were cast in bronze. The casting process was completed in 2005, at which point the Eagle Bronze Foundry in Wyoming took over to build the internal armature, apply the patina, and fi nish the pre-assembly. “It’s quite interesting because if you follow the trail of different places where the mold was built, it was the same trail followed by Juan de Oñate,” notes Ibarra.

The completed sculpture was shipped in six sections on fl atbed trucks to its site in El Paso, where the installation was completed on October 31, 2006. “It took ten years from the fi rst presentation to the unveiling,” says Houser. “I devoted ten years of my life to creating what I thought was a worthy work of art.” But, as Houser found out during the construction process, not everyone agreed with him.

Controversy Erupts

While Houser was in Mexico City working on the enlargement of the sculpture, he began sending photos back to El Paso showing the progress of the monument, and that’s when people began to voice their concerns over its subject. “When we moved to Mexico City the project was sort of forgotten by El Paso,” says Houser. “It wasn’t until the horse was fairly well along that people realized that this was happening after all. We sent photos back to El Paso trying to get some publicity for it, and when people could see the scale of it, that’s when the controversy started.”

Preparing to transport THE EQUESTRIAN from the

Eagle Bronze Foundry in Wyoming to El Paso. Photo courtesy of John Houser

Protestors at a meeting of the El Paso City Council. Photo courtesy of Valadez Media



Activists from the Acoma Pueblo believed that the sculpture celebrated Oñate as a hero of Spanish culture without recognizing the pain and genocide he infl icted on their ancestors. “It didn’t capture the heartache, suffering, pain, humiliation, and defeat that were also part of his legacy,” says Valadez, director of the documentary fi lm. In The Last Conquistador, Acoma activist Maurus Chino says he felt that El Paso was building a monument to honor a person who had tried to end their very existence and compared the sculpture to a Disney version of Southwestern history that celebrated the good without acknowledging the bad. “People began to see this as glorifi cation of a single individual, which it was never intended to be – it was a chapter heading of a period in history,” says Houser.

Opposition to the monument from Native Americans wasn’t unexpected by most of the parties involved in its creation. “Nobody … should have been surprised that Native Americans were deeply offended by this statue,” says Valadez. “What’s interesting to me is a kind of willful blindness; the ability to look at history and to see only certain aspects of that history.” Observing Houser’s reaction to the protests, Ibarra says, “I feel like he was taken aback by the idea that history is alive; it’s not gone. It’s something that people deal with on a day-to-day basis.”

Houser was sympathetic to the concerns of the Native Americans, but stood fi rm that the project should continue. “It was my intention to recognize the past, not to offend the present, but I can see how the sculpture has become sort of a natural sounding board for Native American grievances, not because of what happened 400 years ago, but because those problems still exist today,” he says.

Supporters of the project were excited to see the city erecting a monument that brought Hispanic history – a history they feel has been pushed aside – to the forefront. Conchita Lucero, president of the New Mexican Hispanic Culture Preservation League, says in The Last Conquistador that all residents of the Southwest have benefi ted from the arrival of the Spanish in some way, but that their contributions to U.S. history aren’t recognized in schools. Lucero believes that the story of the Acoma battle is one-sided and doesn’t acknowledge the benefi ts of Spanish colonization. Many supporters felt that the statue provided some overdue recognition for Hispanic cultural heritage.

While Houser continued work on the sculpture, emotions continued to run high on both sides of the debate. Protestors petitioned the El Paso City Council to pull back funding and halt the project. Representatives from both sides of the argument made their cases in an emotional meeting of the City Council. The efforts to halt the project were unsuccessful. “How Native Americans interpreted

that was that the horror that happened to their communities didn’t matter to white people; that they didn’t care that genocide had been committed,” says Valadez. “That’s a powerful allegation to make, and a hard one to argue against.”

The crusades against the monument didn’t end after the City Council meeting. Native Americans and other activists continued to campaign against the sculpture on a local and national scale until, in an attempt to appease the sculpture’s opponents, in 2003 the city handed the project over to the El Paso International Airport and changed the title from DON JUAN DE OÑATE, THE FOUNDER OF THE HISPANIC SOUTHWEST, 1598 to the less controversial THE EQUESTRIAN. Meanwhile, supporters of the sculpture tried to raise funds privately to ensure that the necessary resources were available to complete the project. In the end, ”there was not a cent of tax money that was spent in this project,” says Houser. “Seventy percent of it was raised privately by the Twelve Travelers project.”

The majestic, intricately detailed monument was dedicated, amid cries of protest and heated arguments, on April 21, 2007 at the entrance to the El

Above: Detail of saddle blanket relief done by Ethan Taliesin Houser. Photo courtesy of John Houser.


Date post:	26-Mar-2016
Category:	Documents
Upload:	santa-fe-creative-tourism
View:	222 times
Download:	1 times

John Sherrill Houser - American painter and sculptor.

Documents