EL PASO, Texas (KTSM) — The City of El Paso’s Public Art Program celebrates its 100th completed project with the unveiling of a new mural at Marty Robbins Recreation Center on Wednesday, July 15.

“Guardians of the Southwest” is a mural created by local artists Ivan Ortega, Miguel Picos and Julian Vidales. According to the City of El Paso, all three muralists are also high school art teachers.

The mural displays a lot of El Paso and Southwest motifs, such as a Mexican wolf, plants native of the Chihuahuan Desert, the Star on the Mountain and an homage to Luis Jimenez’s “Los Lagartos” sculpture in Downtown El Paso.

“We wanted to naturally wanted to incorporate a lot of things that represent El Paso,” Vidales said.

Vidales said that the art style of the mural ties old pop art with a modern look.

“We chose it just to give it more of a modern look. It ties to older pop art, but it gives it more of a modern graphic design type feel. There’s other aspects, like these shapes that are bursting out of the star, almost like the legartos are bursting from the center of the Star on the Mountain. And, of course, we went with something that was really graphic and colorful just because, you know, the creative landscape of El Paso is very colorful,” Vidales said.

Picos also added that the incorporation of different style wasn’t just to make it “pop.”

“The wolf has a different style. The plants are a different style. The gators, even the background, the clouds have a different style, just to kind of show, highlight the heat waves in the sky, the eyes and the realism of the wolf, the details on the plants. Everything has its own different style just to highlight itself,” Picos said.

The City’s Public Art Program Manager, Miriam Garcia, said the teachers were picked after an open competition for the commissioned mural.

“They were selected through an open competition where we had different people, local people, submit proposals, and then they were the team selected for this project. It’s actually the first big project, so we’re really happy to have a new set of artists have the opportunity to have such a nice mural and like a really important area of El Paso,” Garcia said.

She highlighted that one of the missions of the art program is to bring artwork to all corners of the community, allowing everyone to enjoy art no matter where they are.

“The public art program always tries to bring artwork to all areas of the community. So that’s a way of finding where there’s not a lot of public art, where we have a great opportunity to put a new project. We always try to do that to connect all that for everybody in the city to have access to the public art without having to go Downtown. They can just go to their rec center and see a beautiful public art project,” Garcia said.

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