Celebrating El Paso’s Lincoln Park’s First Mural by Felipe Adame

On September 25, 2016 at Lincoln Park Day we celebrated the 35th Anniversary of the first mural painted by Chicano Artist Felipe Adame in 1981. Adame painted his first El Paso murals in the early 1980s. He has painted more than a dozen works in the city. Lincoln Park Day is celebrated every year at Lincoln Park and it is organized by the Lincoln Park C C (Lincoln Park Conservation Committee). Every other years LPCC paints a mural at the park but this year it is celebrated the park’s first mural.

Felipe considers his murals "as a means to preserve the culture, to retain a heritage, and to value the community organized effort behind a work of art." Adame had participated in the creation of murals throughout the country before returning to El Paso. Between 1968 and 1972, he painted murals in Denver, Colorado, Kansas City, Montana, California, and Washington, D.C. He was among the artists involved in the Movimiento politics of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

In 1978 he worked with area youth to paint a thirty-by-eighty-foot mural in Chicano Park in San Diego. He also supervised the painting of eight pillars, involving three hundred area high school art classes, each painting one mural at a time during the years from 1974 to 1978. He then participated in Mural Marathon '78, where artists created murals on the pillars of the Coronado Bridge in San Diego.

He took four years of mechanical drawing and drafting and art at El Paso Technical High School, five years of stagecraft and set design at the UTEP Drama Department and two years of mural work under the direction of Jose Montoya in Berkeley, California. In San Diego, he studied under a two-year internship at Centro Cultural de la Raza under Gilberto Ramírez.

His most popular murals are his Virgenes de Guadalupe: the one at Lincoln Cultural Arts Center painted in 1981; one on the west exterior wall of La Corona Grocery on Seventh and South Ochoa streets in memory of Thunderbird gang members slain that year; and another with Juan Diego at the Salazar Housing Projects in 1983.

Jesús Hernández assisted Adame with the painting of the Virgen at La Corona Grocery. In 1981 Hernández painted a richly-detailed Aztec Calendar on a small wall inside the tenements under a flight of steps. He also assisted the Kofu gang members in South El Paso with a mural on the second story of their tenement building at Florence and Eighth streets near the Armijo Center during the early 1980's.

According to Jan Wilson, researcher of Segundo Barrio murals, the art work was taken from an emblem worn on their jackets by Kofu members. Adame's 1981 Virgen image was reproduced in the poster for a 1989 city-wide celebration of Our Lady of Guadalupe.

At Lincoln Park, Adame said he sought to create El Paso's version of San Diego's Chicano Park there, but was deterred by authorities. An unfinished four-by-eight-foot image of a revolutionary figure was also painted in 1981 on a freeway pillar but it was later painted over.

In 1982 Adame painted "Ixtacihuatl, Mujer Blanca, Leyenda de los Volcanos," taken from a painting by the Mexican artist Jesús Helguera, inside the Armijo Recreational Center at 710 East Seventh in South El Paso. He was assisted by Elizabeth Joyce, Raul Macias, Nacho Guerrero and Jesús "Machido" Hernandez. They used a perforated paper technique to transfer the mural on the wall. The wall was plastered by Ignacio Guerrero, Nacho's father. Also in 1982, Adame painted "Dale Gas," at Gator's Grocery in South El Paso. The mural showed a zoot suiter with El Paso's skyline in the background. The thirty-foot mural, which no longer exists, was located near the corner of Sixth Street and the alley west of Cotton street.

The mural of the Virgen of Guadalupe and Juan Diego, the man to whom she appeared in a vision in 1531, was painted by Adame in 1982-83 at the Rubén Salazar Housing Complex Building 10 on Eucalyptus Street at the request of the Thunderbirds and the Cornejo family. It took him six months to complete and was financed by Adame who sold square-foot blocks of the mural to the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), Ruidoso Grocery and numerous other sponsors.

In 1991, the mural was restored by Adame and neighborhood youth with the assistance of a $5,000 stipend from the Junior League's Los Murales Project. Adame in 1986 painted a panoramic scene of early El Paso and the Rio Grande at the Campus Queen Restaurant at 2700 North Mesa drive in West El Paso. The painting shows a covered wagon at the Ysleta Mission.

He began working with youth from Varrio Quinta Street (VQS) at Father Rahm (Fifth Street) and Campbell streets in 1985, in an effort to deter the problem use of spray inhalants in that area. The mural, approximately twenty-two feet long by twenty-six feet high, displays the Aztec gods of Iztaccíhuatl and Popocatépetl. The name of this group reflects the use of the street name for barrio as varrio, also found in the names of several other groups.

In 1985, Adame also painted a mural in Chihuahuita on the garage of Lico Zubia in memory of his son, Forentino Zubia Jr., "Nuni," who had died in a motorcycle accident in 1980.47 Zubia asked Adame to paint a scene from the film "Easy Rider." A pick-up truck is shown emerging from a snow covered area, driving toward a beach. Before traveling to Seattle in 1992 to create other work, Adame restored the mural at the corner of Campbell and Father Rahm under a stipend from the Los Murales Project.

On July 13, 1989 Adame was interviewed for the book Colors on Desert Walls, the Murals of El Paso (1997, Texas Western Press). His interview appears on pages 43-49. The bilingual book is available in most public libraries in El Paso, Texas as well as in art book collections in public libraries, colleges and universities throughout the United States.