Acclaimed artist put his stamp on San Antonio with iconic works
San Antonio artist Jesse Treviño, who created some of the city’s best-known public art, never stopped working.
In the past few months, weakened by COVID and pneumonia, he nevertheless was making plans for new pieces he hoped to get to as soon as he was able.
“He never stopped actively working on the next few projects,” said Anthony Head, Treviño’s biographer. “There is a chapter at the end of my book, ‘There is more time than life.’ And that is exactly what transpired with Jesse, because he just didn’t have enough at the end. But if he could have gotten out of bed, I’m telling you, he would have been working.”
Treviño, who also had been treated twice for cancer, was receiving hospice care. He died Feb. 13 at age 76.
The artist’s iconic work includes “Spirit of Healing,” a 93-foot-tall mural he completed in 1997 on the side of Santa Rosa Children’s Hospital, since renamed the Children’s Hospital of San Antonio; and “La Veladora,” a three-dimensional, 40-foot-tall mural depicting a votive candle bearing the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe that is on the side of the Guadalupe Theater.
“That mural means a lot to a lot of people,” said Cristina Ballí, executive director of the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center. “And it is becoming an icon of the city, just like the Alamo and the Tower of the Americas.”
Treviño’s intent was to create art that would last.
“I want to leave things here that will be around for a long time,” he said in an oral history he recorded with the Smithsonian Institution’s American art archives in 2004. “And if they’re done really nice, if they’re built nice, they’ll be around forever.”
A lifelong artist
Treviño was born in Monterrey, Mexico, the ninth of 12 children. The family moved to San Antonio’s West Side when he was 4 years old.
He was a lifelong artist, winning his first art contest at the age of 6. He had created an image of doves for a wildlife drawing competition for students sponsored by the Witte Museum.
Treviño earned a scholarship to study at the Art Students League in New York, an opportunity cut short after just a year when he was drafted. He was not a U.S. citizen at the time and could have gone to Mexico instead. But he decided against that, planning to return to his studies in New York after his hitch in Vietnam.
About three months into his tour, he was shot by a sniper then stumbled into a booby trap.
In a 2009 interview with the Express-News, Treviño said his mind turned to San Antonio as he lay there bleeding and facing the possibility that he might not survive.
“I was thinking about my mother, my brothers, the barrio where I grew up and all those images — ‘I want to paint them,’ ” he said. “That’s what I was thinking: ‘If there’s any way I can come out of this alive, I’m going to paint those places and those people.’ ”
Painting through the pain
Treviño lost a lot of blood, nearly lost his leg and lost the use of his right arm. After he returned to the United States, he endured a series of operations to try to quell the constant pain in his injured arm, which he had used to paint. After three years, the arm was amputated, though the pain lingered for the rest of his life.
“There was never a day that that pain did not exist,” said Gabriel Velasquez, a close friend of the artist. “It seems to me there’s a very important message about how important art is in the healing of people and in the thing that calls us to our better selves. That’s really Jesse’s life.”
He had to deal with depression along with his physical ailments. Eventually he began to teach himself to paint with his left hand.
Treviño chronicled that time period in “Mi Vida,” an 8-by-14foot mural he painted on his bedroom wall following six months of inactivity after the surgery to remove his arm. The piece includes a Purple Heart hanging from a prosthetic hand and a capsule of the painkiller Darvocet.
“Mi Vida” later was removed from his home and was part of a 2009 retrospective of his work at the short-lived Museo Alameda in Market Square. It also was part of an exhibit digging into the impact of the Vietnam War on American art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in 2019.
Treviño studied art at San Antonio College starting in 1968 and then at Our Lady of the Lake University. He later went to graduate school at the UTSA, earning his master’s degree in 1978.
When he was at SAC, he got involved with Con Safo, the Chicano artists group led by Mel Casas and Felipe Reyes. The group was dedicated to creating work that reflected their community, and that’s precisely what Treviño did throughout his career, said writer Ellen Riojas Clark, professor emerita at UTSA, who has been working on a documentary about him.
“He speaks to the values of Mexican Americans and Latinos and traditions and communities,” she said. “People don’t recognize the cultural wealth of neighborhoods that are poor, nor do they recognize the cultural resources that are there in terms of families, traditions and values. And so for us to go to whatever art gallery there was and see ourselves portrayed was such a validation of who we are and where we live and where we come from.”
Treviño’s work was featured in several well-regarded group exhibitions over the years, starting with the influential 1977 exhibit “Dale Gas: An Exhibit of Contemporary Chicano Art” at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. The exhibit included works by Treviño, Casas, Carmen Lomas Garza, Luis Jiménez and Amado Peña, among others. His work also was included in the landmark 1990 touring exhibition “CARA (“Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation, 1965-1989”).
A part of the landscape
UTSA has eight works of Treviño’s paintings in its art collection, including an image of a raspa vendor, a landscape depicting the West Side and portraits of Romo, civil rights leader Cesar Chavez and former Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff.
“Jesse Treviño’s art is a significant part of the San Antonio landscape,” said Arturo Almeida, who curates UTSA’s collection. “His work proudly reflects a passion for his community, culture, and its voice in history.”