Maybe you’ve heard the chatter on your social media accounts about the City eighty-sixing Margarita Cabrera’s sculpture from the roundabout on Country Club. Well, now she’s threatening to sue the City for a cool half a million dollars. This story is from artnet.com:
Margarita Cabrera is threatening the city of El Paso, Texas, with a half-million-dollar suit over a public sculpture she says the city has destroyed. The 40-foot sculpture was installed in March and then abruptly removed while she was out of town, says the artist’s lawyer, Francis S. Ainsa Jr., of El Paso firm Ainsa Hutson, in a letter to the city forwarded to artnet News.
“Her fondest wish is for the city to allow her to put the sculpture back,” Ainsa told artnet News today.
Her sculpture Uplift, commissioned in 2012, incorporates material from confiscated guns donated by the local sheriff and depicts a flock of birds taking flight as a symbol of transcending violence, according to the artist.
The City has been less than forthcoming regarding the controversy.
Ainsa’s letter says that representatives of the city informed the artist that city manager Tommy Gonzalez ordered the removal of the work because the structure was unsound. The individuals who removed the sculpture will be individually liable, he threatens.
I’d be surprised if City Manager Tommy Gonzalez, or anyone on City Staff, decided to remove the sculpture. My guess is that it was one of our elected officials. The mayor, say, or the City Representative for District 8, or perhaps some campaign contributors. Because, you know, everyone is a critic.
This highhanded effort makes the city look bad to art enthusiasts, a cohort we should be courting. Ms. Cabrera is a respected artist, and the manner in which this sculpture was removed, and the lack of subsequent explanations, make El Paso look like a petty fiefdom run by an anonymous, entitled, power elite.
Are you noticing a pattern?
If this was a political move it was executed poorly, but if we’re being practical here, shouldn’t courting art enthusiasts be a little lower on El Paso’s list of priorities than discouraging its popular image as a gun-ridden abattoir?
Does El Paso have an image as a gun-ridden abattoir? If it does, then maybe we could use this sculpture to start the conversation.
El Paso needs to be who it is, and stop worrying what everyone thinks about it. Are we so insecure that we worry what one little sculpture at one little roundabout says about El Paso? Yeah, maybe a sculpture made from decommissioned firearms is more appropriate for a city like Detroit than for America’s Safest City, but that sculpture offers an opportunity to talk about El Paso, and Juarez, and gun violence. And remember, that sculpture was designed for the suburban Eastside, and not the bucolic Upper Valley.
Good art provokes discussion. And sometimes censorship.
>maybe a sculpture made from decommissioned firearms is more appropriate for a city like Detroit than for America’s Safest City
Yeah, this is more or less what I was getting at. Swords into plowshares may be universal sentiment, but the art-from-guns shtick makes more sense at the Bridge of the Americas than in the El Paso suburbs.
As for El Paso’s image, I can’t count the number of times that the first question people have asked me about it is, “Wow, was it safe to live there?” Your guess is as good as mine whether the cause is old Westerns, Marty Robbins, Cormac McCarthy, The Bridge, or fearmongering about spillover drug war violence, but most Americans would see their misconceptions about El Paso confirmed in a sculpture made from firearms. That’s a problem.
The Upper Valley and much of El Paso loves to live in it’s Dobie Gillis, Father Knows Best fantasy. Many of their neighbors made their fortunes in the drug trade. The sculpture made them uncomfortable for good reason.
So what? If it’s as bad as the twirly-thingy up the road, this is a good thing.
I liked the piece. Drove by it while it was being installed a couple times. I’ve heard that when the extra large gun pieces were added to the piece that neighbors complained and the arts people decided it would make a better statement on the bridge on this side of the border from the gun piece sign in Juarez.