‘Mi Vida’ painting to make bittersweet return
“Mi Vida,” an autobiographical work by the late Chicano artist Jesse Treviño, is coming home, finally.
It’s expected to arrive next week at the Central Library, where it will make its public debut April 1 and remain for a two-year run.
Its return will be bittersweet. The painting by San Antonio’s best-known artist never made it back to its hometown while he was still living. In 2019, it was part of the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s show, “Artists Respond: American Art and the Vietnam War, 1965-1975.”
It was the most comprehensive collection of American art on the impact of the Vietnam War, and “Mi Vida” took up an entire gallery wall.
Two Smithsonian-affiliated museums would get “Mi Vida” next. It made it to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts before the coronavirus shutdown, but never got to Los Angeles.
The artist died Feb. 13. Since then, many of his celebrated murals and other works have been cited among his most important.
I’m most fond of Treviño’s portrait of his mother, which Texas Monthly called “one of the best paintings of an artist’s mother since Whistler’s.”
The accolades about Treviño’s work focused on his grandest public works, but it’s really the 14-by-8-foot “Mi Vida” that most stands out in execution and provenance, both equally remarkable.
Using acrylic on lowly gypsum board, the artist began “Mi Vida” on his bedroom wall in a West Side house where he began a new life in excruciating pain.
He was still learning to paint with his left arm after doctors amputated his right and replaced it with a prosthetic. He’d served in the Vietnam War, in part to earn his U.S. citizenship.
He fought for his adopted country only to come home to battle pain and another war to get Chicano artists recognized by mainstream art museums.
In one of the best art essays about Treviño, Ruben Cordova, curator of his 2009-2010 retrospective at the then-museo Alameda, spoke to Treviño’s suffering.
“He hoped — at the very least — that amputation would end the pain. It did not. The phantom limb burned just as much as the real one had.”
But from despondency arose a determination. Little by little, “Mi Vida” emerged in Treviño’s photorealist style.
First, he painted the wall black, then three metal objects in succession: a prosthetic arm, a Purple Heart and a silver and turquoise bracelet given to him by a woman whose beautiful face haunts “Mi Vida.”
More images would appear on the wall over time, including a Mustang and “a nearly lifesized soldier who grasps his M-1 rifle, just as Treviño did when he was wounded,” Cordova writes.
The self-portrait lacked the artist’s exacting form and color.
“Mi Vida” will hang at the Central Library on a wall just to the right of the escalators and on a walkway to its firstfloor gallery space, officials said.
The library will exhibit Treviño’s
painting along with those in its own collection, which includes artists Jesse Amado, Fernando Botero, Sebastian and Dale Chihuly.
“This was truly a serendipitous project,” Krystal Jones, director of the city’s Department of Arts and Culture, said in a written response to questions.
“With the renovation and reopening of the Central Library, the library team wanted to create an art walk of sorts on the first floor between the escalators and the auditorium using artworks already in their collection as well as newly loaned pieces.”
“At nearly this exact moment, Cindy Gabriel reached out to me for ideas on where ‘Mi Vida’ might be able to be installed
upon its return to San Antonio, specifically expressing her desire for the work to be accessible to our entire community.”
Gabriel’s diligent efforts to save “Mi Vida” adds to the painting’s unique history. In 2000, the San Antonio attorney bought the home on Mistletoe Avenue where Treviño once lived.
Gabriel bought the home for $60,000 to flip it, an investment now worth many times that sum. That the painting was intact decades after its completion in the early 1970s was already remarkable.
But the drywall was a lot older than that, and its surface isn’t one on which to produce art, let alone a painting now considered a national treasure important to the story of Mexican
Americans and U.S. veterans.
Art experts told Gabriel it couldn’t be saved. They had no idea the depth of Mexican ingenuity and what West Side carpenters armed with ordinary construction tools could do.
Once safely extracted, Gabriel had it professionally restored. A thin, honeycombed aluminum mesh was placed onto it to protect its integrity.
When you see it next month — in only the fifth space “Mi Vida” has ever seen outside a little house on Mistletoe — you’ll notice another puro San Antonio detail.
At Gabriel’s insistence, the wall’s original electric outlet was left on the painting.