Jaguar Spirit

The mural titled Jaguar Spirit is made up of a variety of Texas A&M University-San Antonio student and staff portraits in an abstract gradient landscape with native plant life. It is a snapshot of those who have been on campus from 2021-2022 who also represent this particular generation of academics at this institution.
Student and staff portraits include those from an Art Appreciation class, A&M SA Spirit, Mr. & Mrs. A&M SA, the Mexican-American Student Association, graduates from El Espejo magazine, the National Coming Out Fair, Black Student Union, members of the women’s soccer team, and TU CASA’s summer camp program.
They are surrounded by native plant life to acknowledge the roots of this land that the school sits on. Sacred elements rendered in the traditional style of the surviving codices of Mesoamerican tlacuilos include images of flowers, copal, nopales, grass, water, and maíz. Plants rendered with a style reminiscent of European dimensionality include sunflowers, bluebonnets, and the coneflower. Painting both flat and dimensional elements illustrates the various cultural aesthetics that we gain from Art History, and how each is equally important to the next.
Lastly a jaguar figure, an iteration of the TAMUSA mascot, was pulled from the Codex Borgia and is made up of the school colors. The jaguar emanates zigzags throughout the figures and plants. Tepeyóllotl, in Mexica traditions, is the deity of jaguars, and connects the mural to TAMUSA as a Latinx-serving institution. This reference comes from one of the few surviving pre-Columbian painted manuscripts known as the codices. Like the scaled-up image of this jaguar, I want to tie in the persistence of this generation of students to commit to their education in the midst of a life-altering pandemic, who should be very proud of their accomplishments.