Enrique Alférez

One person I learned about while I was in New Orleans recently was the artist Enrique Alférez.

He was born in 1901 in Zacatecas, Mexico. He ran away from home when he was 12 and ended up fighting with Pancho Villa until he was a young man. He then went to Texas, where he met an art teacher from Chicago, who recruited him to the School of the Art Institute. He studied there in the late 1920s, then ended up in New Orleans on his way back to Mexico…and never left.


In that first decade, his work was funded by the WPA. Many of his sculptures are now in the New Orleans Botanical Garden in City Park, which is where I saw them. 

They include seven athletic figures originally created for the gates of the park's Tad Gormley Stadium. Here are three of those:


I particularly liked these because they are not all figures of men.

There are a number of explanatory panels in the park about his life and work, created by the Helis Foundation. The Foundation has nice videos of the sculpture garden on its website. 

According to one of the panels, "After this garden fell into disrepair and neglect in the 1960s and 1970s, it was the restoration of Enrique Alférez's art that acted as a catalyst for the Friends of City Park to undertake the redevelopment of the New Orleans Botanical Garden in the early 1980s."

These are three of the statues in the Helis Foundation Enrique Alférez Sculpture Garden. 

Woman in a Huipil: 



Adam and Eve:



La Soladera:


A placard I saw said the La Soladera statue's face is based on that of Alférez's mother. It's hard to tell in my photo, but the woman is breast-feeding the baby. 

This head of a woman is in the Historic New Orleans Collection museum:



The city celebrated Alférez's contributions in 1999, not long before his death at age 98.



In 2020, the Historic New Orleans Collection had a show about his life and work, and a book was created about his life and work. It is still available for sale.  

I didn't realize the book existed when I was in the museum's shop, or I probably would have bought it. Now I have to think about sending for it.