El Paso's 'Equestrian' is largest bronze equestrian statue in the world
03.11.2007 - The largest bronze equestrian statue in the world is right here in Texas. The controversial artwork by sculptor John Sherrill Houser was unveiled this year at El Paso International Airport.
The largest bronze equestrian statue in the world is right here in Texas. The controversial artwork by sculptor John Sherrill Houser was unveiled this year at El Paso International Airport. It's 42 feet high on an 8-foot base, and, in addition to its height, one of its claims to fame is that the horse is rearing, a tremendous sculptural balancing act, with the airborne front legs cantilevered from the horse's hind legs and tail. The statue is called "The Equestrian," a generic title that kept the project from being sacked. The problem was the subject: Don Juan de Oñate, the conquistador who, in 1598, put El Paso on the map. Oñate's character was under attack. In particular, atrocities Oñate is said to have committed at the Acoma pueblo in New Mexico were decried. Historians still dispute whether Oñate carried out his savage order, but there is no doubt that he decreed that each male in the pueblo older than 25 have a foot amputated. (Some say the document specifies "puntos de pie," which translates as the toes of the foot.) At the Oñate Monument and Visitors Center in Alcalde, N.M., in 1991, the foot of a statue of Oñate sculpted by Reynaldo Rivera was cut off, and a note was left that said "Fair is fair." In letters to the local newspaper, a group called Friends of Acoma claimed to have done it. Houser knew of the act and knew of the controversy. "Although we anticipated problems," he said, "I believed in the power of the art to overcome." Also, of Houser's proposed Twelve Travelers — bronze sculptures selected to spotlight important eras in the history of El Paso — "Oñate is the only candidate capable of representing the early Spanish colonization of the Southwest." To Houser, the controversy seems baseless. "Monumental art can serve different purposes," he said. "It can commemorate and inform. It doesn't have to glorify." Nonetheless, in the eyes of protesters, the statue of Oñate did glorify. "They mistook the period for the individual," Houser said. No one complained when the first bronze in the Houser series known as "The XII Travelers Memorial of the Southwest" was installed in 1997. The statue commemorating Fray García de San Francisco, who founded the first surviving area mission, was greeted with enthusiasm when it was completed and placed in El Paso's Pioneer Plaza. Not so with the Oñate. Photographer Jody Schwartz, who also is a fundraiser for the XII Travelers project, recalled the city council meeting where the effort almost died: "It was 2003. We were astounded at the roomful of people with placards. A lot of Native Americans had come from New Mexico. They were saying they didn't want the project at all, and the whole project almost went down." John Cook, then a council member and now mayor of El Paso, proposed that Oñate's name be dropped and that the statue instead be called "The Equestrian." That proposal passed by one vote. "I don't agree with the name change," sculptor Houser said, "but at the time, it was a stroke of compromise that saved the project." "The Equestrian" was dedicated April 21. "It was a huge success," Schwartz recalled. "There were people from all over the world. It was an international event." Those who protested the piece were present, too. "There were drums, and there was whooping," Schwartz said, "but the speeches could be heard, and it made the dedication more exciting." And it was somehow in keeping with the spirit of El Paso. "We were a gunslinging town," she said. "We didn't have a pretty history all the time." According to Houser's brother Nicholas, an anthropologist who documented the XII Travelers project, the other proposed figures for the series include exiled Mexican President Benito Juárez, revolutionary Pancho Villa, healer Estevanico the Moor, pioneer Susan McGoffin, Buffalo soldier Henry Ossian Flipper, female Apache warrior Lozen and gunfighter John Wesley Hardin. "None of the figures are saints," Schwartz said, "but they represent the 400-plus years of history in our region and our city. And," she added, until now, "it's a history that people pretty much didn't know." Information: (915) 533-6448, www.elpasocvb.com. Banks is a freelancer writer from Bastrop.
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