Chavis Mármol, a Mexico City artist who went viral for dropping a nine-ton Olmec head onto a blue Tesla Model 3, will open his latest exhibit in San Antonio this week as ArtPace’s International Artist in Residence.
Mármol’s latest work, opening Thursday at ArtPace, is sure to cause shock waves of its own.
That’s because Mármol has taken a replica of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima and turned it into a mechanical bull that he plans to ride. Mármol told Texas Monthly that he was inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 anti-war classic Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, starring Peter Sellers.
Mármol will ride the bomb at the exhibit’s Opening Reception, which takes place from 6-9 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 17, at ArtPace, 445 N. Main Ave.
For the piece, Mármol has disassembled a mechanical bull, removing the plastic exterior and replacing it with a wooden replica of Little Boy, the atomic bomb that killed more than 100,000 residents of Hiroshima in 1945.
He told Texas Monthly that although he’d been toying with the idea for years, the time was finally right, and that there was no place for it but Texas.
“The timing is perfect,” Mármol told the publication. “In Mexico City, we don’t have the culture of mechanical bulls, but here, I think people will really connect with it.”
The piece is especially timely as recent polls show most Americans want an end to the Iran War. Meanwhile, the Trump administration announced Tuesday that it plans to send Israel another $2.8 billion in 2,000-pound bombs designed to cause mass-casualty events, according to ABC News.
This piece is only the latest of Mármol’s works that challenge the power structure.
Millions watched Mármol’s destruction of the Tesla on TikTok, Instagram and other platforms. What destroyed the vehicle made it all the more potent. The Olmec head is a hand-carved replica of a pre-Aztec icon of Mesoamerica.
The symbolism was clear. The Tesla represented Elon Musk, the wealthiest man in the world, and a white tech broligarchy hell-bent on “progress” that comes with a steep cost to everyone outside its ranks. This slick, cold symbol of the future, divested from ancient truths like nature and community, is defeated in the piece by something fundamental, mystical and unchanging — a symbol of Indigenous wisdom, which society has devalued and discarded.
Inspired by Texas-born artist Jimmie Durham’s sculpture Still Life With Spirit and Xitle, Mármol spent two years painstakingly carving the Olmec head. Similarly, Mármol spent all summer carving, sawing and sanding a replica L-11 nuke as a critique of U.S. military aggression fueled by toxic masculinity.
The Tesla piece skyrocketed him to fame in the age of social media, and the resulting destruction remains on view in a vacant lot in Mexico City’s Roma neighborhood.
Based in Mexico City, Mármol is a self-described “4×4 all-terrain artist,” according to a bio circulated by ArtPace. Mármol’s work assembles, translates, and transplants iconic figures from pop culture, art history, and the collective imagination with an irreverent sense of humor. Mármol is known to incorporate various sculptural techniques and materials (stone, wood, metal, clay, resin, textiles, organic waste, and more), frequently pairing them with performative acts staged in public space.
The exhibit is curated by Rigoberto Luna, a native San Antonian. Luna has brought two other artists to Artpace for the September 17 show.
One is Roksana Pirouzmand, a Los Angeles artist who is showing large-scale oxidation paintings. Pirouzmand will also offer up a performance piece in which she and her mother will sit in rocking chairs at opposite ends of a wave pool, generating clashing waves that represent what is shared and lost between generations.
The other artist featured in the exhibit is Irene Antonia Diane Reece, a Houston artist with a project documenting the history of Fuerza Unida, a worker-led activist group founded by laid-off Levi Strauss seamstresses in San Antonio in 1990.
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