By Ho Baron

1982 El Paso designated the downtown as a Tax Increment Financing (TIF) district, creating a special tax fund to finance projects to help increase downtown property values. The money was for street improvements, to improve store fronts, develop the Union Depot area, or to give direct benefits to downtown business owners (whatever that means).

1988 The 12 Travelers project lobbied for and was awarded $1,000,000 of TIF money toward a $3.7 million plan. The project, with John Houser as sculptor of the 12 bronze sculptures, was to have a Review Committee and an Executive Board, each composed of 12 members. The Review Committee was politically appointed, advisory in function and set up under the auspices of the city's Department of Economic Development. The Executive Board was to be the private, non-profit, fund-raiser for the $2.7 million balance needed for the project, and it was to publicize the project's contribution to TIF objectives, i.e. raise the downtown's tax base and increase tourism. $137,000 was set aside for the first sculpture.

1997 The first of the 12 Travelers, a 14 foot Fray Garcia de San Francisco, was unveiled in September 1997 at a cost of $241,000. It seems the city had trouble obtaining $50,000 private funds to be paid within three years of a 1991 contract, and according to a Times article, by 1997 the city still hadn't received payment. Also in 1997, the TIF zone was dissolved, because the TIF project evidently failed to boost revenue downtown. It's assumed the 12 Travelers $1,000,000 has been held in a separate fund.

1998 The second sculpture, Don Juan de Onate, a 21 foot sculpture for $500,000, was scheduled for dedication April 1998, the 400th anniversary of Onate's fording the mighty Rio Grande, the First Thanksgiving.

2001 The Onate sculpture will be almost four years overdue by the time its supposed to be installed at the end of the year. The $500,000 has grown to more than $1.2 million, the 21 foot figure is now 36 feet, and it will be almost four and a half stories tall on its base. $130,000 is to be contributed by the city. Because of complications at the Mexico City foundry, the Onate figure is to be completed in Colorado foundry, which seems sure to increase its price even more. Sometime in the 1990's, a $75,000 grant from the El Paso Energy Foundation and $30,000 from the El Paso Community Foundation are mentioned. They're the only significant contributions ever mentioned in the press, which makes one wonder how progress is going in tapping the public for the balance. A third traveler, incidentally, Susan Magoffin, for $88,000, is to be paid for by the El Paso International Association for the Visual Arts.

January 2001

Thoughts On The 12 Travelers
By Ho Baron

John Houser's an incredible guy. Unknown, he came to El Paso from Tucson about a dozen years ago, and he must have politicked like a madman for his giant city sculpture project, the 12 Travelers, because what he developed was unheard of elsewhere in this country in these times. He recruited volunteers, formed his special interest committees, made his calls, wrote the letters, got city endorsed, tapped into downtown TIF money for partial funding, and all the time he was sculpting, making busts, building clients, selling to collectors and working hard.

Houser's got good energy, he's a good sculptor, perhaps he's even a fine one. A great sculptor, who knows? His first traveler, Fray Garcia de San Fransisco, is well executed, a superb head atop an excellent robe, actually a little more, still but a head atop a robe. If he can pull off a 4 1/2 story tall Don Juan de Onate mounted on a horse and it not look like an atrocity, John'll then deserve some real credit. It's not an easy feat. The fact that he's conned El Paso into such an unexpectedly immense figure, that's a lot of ego! City council after city council must have been bamboozled by the 12 Travelers Executive Board. The ultimate test of the legitimacy of the Onate figure will be if, in the end, (1)the sculpture is a gargantuan, awkward Trojan horse dumped on a naive city, or (2)it is a truly wondrous monument worthy of its space and our admiration as the nation's largest equestrian statue. After all, El Paso's going to have to live with the thing a long time.

Few new large-scale historic bronze figures are appearing in American cities, as art has taken on many new faces and forms. As for the historic, efforts tend more toward preservation than the parading of 'heroes on horses' to the public, but more on that later. Some say the 12 Travelers is more about history than art. Though it was conceived as a downtown beautification, history project, Houser is creating artistic renditions of historic personages. Hardly imaginative, the forms are a result of the creative act, and their enactment is intensive and highly skilled both in execution and process. And even though the style might be passe for large scale U.S. sculptures, some countries like Mexico unveil such bronze historic figures frequently.

While the El Paso's culture, art world, museums and library have been undermined by the Ramirez administration (and the El Paso Community College and school systems are under continuous attack by the El Paso Times), the 12 Travelers undertaking has escaped any serious criticism, thus the reason for writing this article. Controversy and outcries have been primarily related to the 12 Traveler list of historic figures, where to place them and the sculptor's tardiness in producing his first two figures as scheduled. The fury regarding the list of 'heroes,' their location and Houser's meeting deadlines has in fact been smokescreen to perhaps greater issues and questions.

Houser and his Board were politically correct in including the public in the discussion of which 'heroes' to select for the project. Evidently, they picked the wrong public nonetheless to survey when including Onate in on their list, because he's anything but a revered figure to many El Pasoans. As the first military governor of New Mexico, his 1599 crimes, 12 in all, against the indigenous Indian population brought the Spanish government to recall him and ban him from New Mexico. He spent the rest of his life seeking exoneration, and history has labeled him a brutal ruler and racist. (Incidentally, of the 600,000 Indians our hero Columbus found when he 'discovered' America, half were dead for various reasons within two years after his arrival.) So just as Onate cut off the feet of 24 Acoma Pueblo men and gave 20 years hard labor to males between the ages of 12 to 25, a foot was cut off an Alcalde, New Mexico Onate bronze in protest in 1998. Already expressed resentment of El Paso's Onate seems to ensure a similar fate for the figure here, that is unless the feet are too high to reach.
The placement of the Onate on horseback figure became a muddle, especially when Houser increased its size to humongous. Its 4 1/2 story outrageous size, with stand, has brought the Executive Board members to liken it Mt. Rushmore, the Statue of Liberty, the Eiffel Tower and the Golden Gate Bridge. On the other hand, jokesters seem to be focusing on the size of the horse's genitals, and what it will be like to gaze up at them from underneath. Anyhow, downtown's Calendar Park and the Hotel Camino Real locations are too small an area for placement of the Onate, and the Plaza Park already has the Jimenez alligator sculpture. Hart's Mill near the Hacienda Restaurant, where Onate crossed the Rio Grande, is out of the original TIF zone, thus disqualifying it for TIF funding, and San Elizario is too far from the city center. Meanwhile there are those who oppose the Onate theme and would wish for the giant horse and rider to be mounted on top City Hall, then ceremoniously pushed off. It seems Cleveland Square, behind the El Paso Public Library, will be Onate's resting-place, and it will over-tower both the library and new history museum. There are forces even lobbying to take substantial space for the statue from the square block on which the library sits, up to one half of that block. If that occurs, forcing the library into a confined area only able to build upwards in expansion, it would be a disgrace and another ignorant insult to the cultural institutions of this city.

What are some of the greater issues and questions the 12 Travelers presents? Aside from it obtrusive size, the money and volunteer time committed to the project is money and effort that has been and will continue to be siphoned away from many other very worthy cultural efforts in El Paso, especially when culture here gets so little support. Furthermore, will the Travelers really promote downtown revitalization, and why should it attract tourism? The stadium/arena promoters promised large tourism benefits when trying to siphon the public's millions for their private enterprise, while the Hotel/Motel Association denies Cohen Stadium has had any effect on tourism. So, why might the 12 Travelers draw hoards of lookers?

Surely Houser deserves congratulations on pulling off the first two of his 12 Travelers, but it is questionable whether the project should be continued, at least with Houser's involvement. If the city insists on the other figures, why not create a national competition to bring other sculptors into the situation, thus bringing diversity in style and approach to the forms and perhaps a little control over their size and cost? Or better yet, why not contribute some of that money and effort into some current forms of art that are sparking American artists, communities and cities?

A May/June 1996 Utne Reader article entitled "No More Heroes on Horses: Public Art is Changing with the Times" by Keith Goetzman says the following:

"It might be the AIDS Quilt, a graffiti mural, or a community parade. It could even be a Greenpiece activist skydiving off a smokestack, or a home page on the World Wide Web. Public art can be many things inthe 1990's - but it's not likely to be what it used to be: a bronze statue in a park or big hunk of abstract sculpture next to a skyscraper. 'Public art isn't a hero on a horse anymore,' states Arlene Raven in her introduction to Art in the Public Interest (DeCapo Press, 1993), a collection of essays by artists, art historians, and critics that struggles to define and explain a genre that has changed so rapidly as to defy containment.

'An explosion of new forms in the 1980,s - as diverse as street art, guerrilla theater, video, page art, environments, posters, murals, paintings and sculpture - radically changed the face of contemporary public art,' Raven writes ....

The legacy of this kind of work today is a churning artistic environment in which community members are often drawn into the creative process and social and political aims are frequently elevated above aesthetic concerns. Performance artist Suzanne Lacy offers 'new genre public art' as a potential label for this new breed of art that isn't about constructing objects as much as it's about constructing community.

Patricia C. Phillips, one of the essayists in Lacy's Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art (Bay Press, 1995), points out that the new forms 'encourage, through actions, ideas and interventions, a participatory audience where none seemed to exist.

Inherent in public art is the issue of its reception ... Community involvement is the raw material of artistic practice."

NOTE: Both books cited above are available at the UTEP library. The facts for this commentary were taken from previous Times articles, and it was written to open dialogue on the 12 Travelers and public art in general in El Paso. This publication, Bridge, welcomes a response to the remarks of the writer. As a sculptor himself, Ho realizes the article opens him up to a slew of criticism, of which he welcomes. January 2001