Salvador Jiménez-Flores’ ‘Raíces & Resistencias,’ at Grounds for Sculpture, makes bold statements

Salvador Jiménez-Flores’ “Memoria, Tierra, Trabajo: A Glimpse of the Semiquincentennial 2025.”

Because of their versatility, earth pigments are hard to imitate. When applied in thick layers, they can achieve the silky opacity of mudflats and riverbeds. When they are dusted lightly on walls and canvases, they often resemble aerosol. Since they contain no colors or textures other than the ones granted to the substance by God, they possess a kind of purity that can help an artwork feel elemental. An artist working with earth is engaged in a primordial act. He is digging in the dirt, just as a child (or a sandpiper) might.

He is also taking property in that dirt: He is saying that it is his birthright to use. The artist who paints with soil is making a tacit land claim. He may be marking his territory or pledging his allegiance to a particular place on earth. Or, like Jalisco, Mexico-born sculptor and muralist Salvador Jiménez-Flores, he may be pushing back. The material with which he has made “Memoria, Tierra, Trabajo: A Glimpse of the Semiquincentennial 2025,” an 80-foot piece of wall art at Grounds for Sculpture in Hamilton, is unmistakably earth, and the message is that it is his earth, the earth of the Americas inhabited by his ancestors from pre-Colombian times, and therefore it is his prerogative to move it around, or move around it, as he likes.

A detail from Salvador Jiménez-Flores’ “Memoria, Tierra, Trabajo: A Glimpse of the Semiquincentennial 2025.”

“Semiquincentennial 2025” is the heavyweight anchor of “Raíces & Resistencias,” an exhibition of new work by Jiménez-Flores that begins in the indoor East Gallery and continues with two substantial sculptural pieces on the outdoor grounds. Common to these works are bold gestures, bright colors, a visible relationship to the earth, and symbolism drawn from natural phenomena. The artist consistently identifies himself with cacti — indigenous, thorny, resilient, difficult to root out, dangerous to approach but capable of gorgeous efflorescence.

The cactus is also equipped for defensive fighting. “Raíces & Resistencias” suggests that Jiménez-Flores expects to have to do some. Even “Memoria, Tierra, Trabajo: A Glimpse of the Semiquincentennial 2025,” big and bold as it is, feels besieged. Some of its main features include surveillance helicopters and fighter jets, alligators, a serpent with the head of the President, bursts of flame, and two hovering, all-seeing eyes. A sinuous rail line leads to an American flag made of barbed wire and chain link. The muralist is placing the viewer in the weathered shoes of a migrant, exposed and unarmed, expected to traverse harsh terrain, heels nipped by serpents, vulnerable to incarceration, always under observation by a faceless power that hides its malevolence behind anonymity.

This is a gutsy, timely, uncompromising piece, and in October 2025, it is a courageous thing for Grounds for Sculpture to show. The Hamilton art park isn’t merely helping Jiménez-Flores make a play for sympathy for people who have been widely villainized. They have given the artist a big, wide wall to decorate in their main exhibition gallery, and they are encouraging visitors to wrap themselves in the muralist’s vision. Jiménez-Flores has, for instance, augmented all of the fire extinguishers and alarms in the East Gallery with images of flames. He is telling us that if it seems, lately, like the entire hemisphere is on fire, there is no easy way out of this conflagration. To get to the fix, we are going to have to go through the heat.

A detail from Salvador Jiménez-Flores’ “Gritos Grabados en la Penca del Nopal.”

In “Gritos Grabados en la Penca del Nopal,” another sprawling wall piece across the chamber from “Memoria, Tierra, Trabajo: A Glimpse of the Semiquincentennial 2025,” words themselves are on fire. Jiménez-Flores has painted statements, slogans and wishes on ceramic cactus leaves, affixed each to the wall, and surrounded them with a crimson burst of sand and earthen pigment. Spines of the nopal, flickering flame, the guarded look in the eyes of the artist, who depicts himself in the middle of the blaze … everything ends in a point. In his self-portrait, Jiménez-Flores armors himself in cactus skin, pins a lurid desert bloom to his lapel, and stares at us beneath a head of hair that resembles a crown of flames. The fire, like the earth, is his by right, and the statements on the leaves — no human is illegal, education not deportation, a reminder that immigrants feed the United States, and others like them — are his words to us.

There are fewer written phrases in “Memoria, Tierra, Trabajo: A Glimpse of the Semiquincentennial 2025,” but it as just as easy to read. The artist draws a visual connection between the masked enforcers of ICE and the hooded killers of The Ku Klux Klan. A bag of money dangling from the chain-link flag is a clear reference to the cozy relationship between the Justice Department and the private prison industry. Jiménez-Flores has defamiliarized the map of the hemisphere by tipping it on its side and presenting it as one continuous land mass. The only line of demarcation visible is provided by a snake that traces the outline of Mexico before the cession of 1848. Red circles like shotgun wounds mark the sites of U.S. intervention. In the corner of the mural, The Niña, The Pinta and The Santa María make appearances, too. They look very small.

Through this psychic map of the New World (one that contains an actual map), Jiménez-Flores prompts us to confront a fact too often glossed over. American history begins long before the establishment of The United States. In the grand sweep of global happenstance, George Washington is a newcomer to this continent, and those currently making nativist immigration policy north of The Rio Grande have barely arrived. A visitor might object to the bluntness of the artist’s approach, but there is no faulting his chronology. If there are invaders in this story, it is neither the Mexicans nor their descendants.

Salvador Jiménez-Flores’ “La Resistencia de los Nopales Híbridos: El Susurro del Desierto.”

The sculptures on the Grounds pledge allegiance to traditions far older than the Continental Congress. The impassive head at the base of “La Resistencia de los Nopales Híbridos: El Susurro del Desierto” — an anthropomorphized, cactus-shaped statue far taller than a man — bears a resemblance to the colossal stone busts crafted by The Olmec of Central Mexico in the ninth century BCE. Jiménez-Flores rests the chin of his defensive warrior against a tiered platform that alludes to the stepped terraces of Mesoamerican pyramids. The artist has etched a prayer into metal replicas of cactus leaves, and he has his lineage on his mind: The scratched letters read “I am my ancestors’ wildest dream.”

Surely that is true. His forebears would be amazed to find this human cactus growing so far from the equator, teaching at a university, and crafting subversive murals and statues at a sculpture garden that features art from all over the world.

But some plants, “Raíces & Resistencias” argues, are compelled by circumstances to move. “Caminantes,” a smaller statue, presents two steel approximations of flat, stalk-like cacti, segmented like the blades of Aztec ceremonial swords. This pair of plants has been walking through the Southwestern desert, tracing the paths of countless migrants from one part of America to another. The two nopales rise together, spiny and gnarled, like two columns of blue-green flame. They are attached at their bases to bronzed replicas of a pair of lovingly crafted and well traveled feet.

Those feet, it should surprise no one to learn, belong to the artist himself.

Grounds for Sculpture in Hamilton will present “Salvador Jiménez-Flores: Raíces & Resistencias” through Aug. 1, 2027. Visit groundsforsculpture.org.

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