Jesse Treviño

Jesus Treviño (December 24, 1946 – February 13, 2023), better known as Jesse Treviño, was a Mexican-born American visual artist. He essentially became a Chicano artist after he was wounded in Vietnam during the Vietnam War, which required him to learn how to paint with his left hand. In 2016, restaurateur Jorge Cortez declared: "San Antonio and Treviño are synonymous."

Treviño attended and won his first art award from the Witte Museum when he was six years old. He attended Fox Tech High School where a teacher named Katherine Alsup helped him obtain a scholarship in 1965 to study in New York City at the Art Student's League. In 1966, Treviño was drafted into the military to serve in the Vietnam War. He had the opportunity to return to Mexico as a Mexican national, thus avoiding military service, but he chose to enlist and gain U.S. citizenship. He served in the B Co., 39th Infantry, 9th Infantry Division and trained at Fort Riley. He was deployed to Vietnam in December 1966. On February 23, 1967, he was seriously injured while crossing a rice paddy by sniper fire and a booby trap. As he lay injured, he began to think about what was important in his life; he vowed that if he lived, he would return home to San Antonio and paint his family and community.

Treviño was treated at a military hospital in Japan before being moved to Fort Sam Houston. Treviño's recovery was lengthy, and he would not be able to walk for a year. His right arm, his dominant hand, would eventually be amputated in late 1970. Armando Albarran, a fellow veteran who had both of his legs amputated due to war wounds, encouraged Treviño to paint with his left hand. A portrait of Albarran was the first painting Treviño completed with his left hand. Members of this group included prominent San Antonio artists Felipe Reyes (the principal founder and a close friend) and Mel Casas, Treviño's former teacher at SAC, who joined the group at the same time. Treviño referred to the group as "a magic circle" in a 1994 newspaper article. He died on February 13, 2023, at the age of 76. San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg tweeted: "Jesse Treviño was an American hero. The wounds of the Vietnam war, which took so many of his friends and neighbors from the Westside of San Antonio, never left him, but he used those scars to bring healing to millions of people." It depicted the after-effects of the artist's service in Vietnam, caused by his near-fatal wounds. The mural's central element is the face of a beautiful young woman, partially obscured by a monumental rendition of Treviño's prosthetic limb from which his Purple Heart medal is suspended. On the right, a young soldier is painted in black-and-white. A Ford Mustang, bought with the artist's disability pay, is on the left. The beer, cigarettes, and the pain-killer at the top of the painting are substances he used to combat excruciating pain. At the time of the retrospective, Elaine Ayala said it was a painting "that many had heard of but few had seen". Melissa Ho, curator of the Smithsonian exhibition, noted: "Trevino's haunting, hallucinatory work anchored the final gallery of the show, stopping visitors in their tracks." Mi Vida will be on view at San Antonio's main library for two years, commencing April 1, 2023.

Cordova notes how quickly Treviño mastered a new kind of painting with his left hand: "what's most amazing to me is how strong his works were immediately after losing his arm. ... I would just assume that he'd need a long time to retrain. But it's just like he reloaded and came right out and painted better than ever."

As he was finishing Mi Vida, Treviño painted another important work called La Fe (1972). This hand picking oranges (which has a tattoo of a cross) refers to the United Farm Workers and the Chicano movement. Treviño said both paintings were "done in the spirit of Con Safo". Since it is visible at a confluence of highways, The Spirit of Healing is his best known public artwork.

In 1997-98, Treviño created La Curandera, a mural at the University Health System Texas Diabetes Center. Here Treviño references folk healing traditions, as represented by the Casa Mireles botánica and its proprietress, who supplied herbal remedies. La Veladora is based on La Veladora, a painted construction made in 1999. Guillermo Nicolas, president of the Alameda National Center for Latino Arts, declared: "This is a stellar curatorial undertaking showcasing the work of one of America's most important Latino artists." It was deemed one of the year's ten best exhibitions by the San Antonio Express-News: "Treviño may be San Antonio's best-known artist, but curator Ruben C. Cordova's exhaustively researched retrospective showed us there was still plenty to learn about the painter and muralist."

Resources An oral history with Jesse Treviño (2004) by the Archives of American Art (AAA), Smithsonian Institution, is available online. In 2020, the AAA made a video that is available on YouTube.