Sculpture Garden Tour

Docents offer guided walks through the Sculpture Garden from April through November at 10 a.m., Tuesday through Saturday. Group tours may also be arranged by special request. School tours are offered on a limited basis. Teachers can call (505) 243-7255 or e-mail tasedillo@cabq.gov for details.

Self-guided tour books of the Sculpture Garden are available for check-out at the Museum Information booth in the lobby.

Sculpture Garden tours are operated under the direction of The Albuquerque Museum Education Division. Contact Theresa Sedillo, Administrative Assistant for Education, at (505) 243-7255 for information.

Here is a sampling of what visitors will encounter in the Sculpture Garden.

 

HOWL
1986
Luis Jiménez
Bronze, #1 of 5
60" x 29" x 29"
Museum purchase
1987 General Obligation Bonds

 

 

 

 

The late Luis Jiménez was born in 1940 in El Paso, Texas. His artistic experience began when he was a boy helping his father construct neon and plaster signs. He attended the University of Texas in Austin, before receiving his B.S. in Art and Architecture in 1964. Jiménez received numerous major commissions and his Mexican heritage was a major influence in his works of figurative art.

"I think it may be Jiménez howling. He grew up an outsider within mainstream culture. For years he stood alone as an artist, making heroically realistic sculptures when abstraction was the fashion. He refuses to deny his Mexican origins or the everyday culture of the American Southwest, and he continues to reject the cool sophistication of New York art. His art hotly celebrates cowgirls, rodeo riders, Indian buffalo hunters. He is howling for his people, for the Indians and the cowboys, for the coyotes, and for the vanishing west."

Terry Barrett, Art Critic
The Getty Center for Education in the Arts.

 

BIRTH OF A DREAM
2003
John Boomer
Bronze
96"x 36" x 28"
Gift of Keith and Frauke Roth, in memory of Voni and Charles Yerkes
2003.36.1

John Boomer has been working for over thirty years as a full time, self-taught artist. He received a B.A. in Psychology from Chico State University, California. Through his work as a teacher on the Navajo Reservation in Rough Rock, Arizona, he grew to love the land and the people. This provided much insight and inspiration for his sculpture. In 1972 he left his teaching career to move to New Mexico, where he still resides and sculpts full-time.  

“I strive to create something simple and serene-something that reflects the harmony that ideally should exist between nature and human spirit.”

“I’ve been guided by courage and faith, principles of good craftsmanship, an open concept of face and form, and the poetic constructions of figurative, symbolic, and abstract forms combined to make a personal statement. I want the work to be half understood, to stimulate a dream, to be beautiful in structure and form, to be playful for the mind.”

John Boomer

UNTITLED (figure on bench)
ca. 1960
Donald Duncan
Concrete, metal60” x 96”
Gift of R.L. Stohler
2003.47.1





Donald Duncan was born in 1931 in Orange, New Jersey. He first entered William and Mary College at Williamsburg, Virginia in 1950. A year later he joined the Marines and served in the Korean War. In 1955, he re-enrolled in William and Mary, receiving a B.F.A. in 1960.  In 1963 he received an M.F.A. from the University of New Mexico. Duncan worked in sculpture, using lead, stone and mosaic overlay.  He died a year later at the age of 33 in collision near Chihuahua, Mexico. “Duncan reached out for a life that was to be rich and warm and broad.  And out of that life, out of this depth comes his art.  Art was to him the result of living, of experiencing, of knowing about things.”
 
From the catalogue forward to a memorial exhibition sponsored by the Corrales Gallery Association