Enrique Alferez: The Mexican Sculptor Who Shaped the City

The Mexican Sculptor Who Shaped the City

Enrique Alferez came to New Orleans by accident. He was a young Mexican sculptor passing through the city in the late 1920s, ran out of money, and stayed. He stayed for seven decades. By the time he died in 1999 at ninety-eight years old, his work was so woven into the physical fabric of New Orleans that most people who saw his sculptures every day had no idea they were all made by the same man—a penniless artist from a small town in Mexico who got stranded in the right city at the right time.

Alferez was born in 1901 in San Miguel del Mezquital, Mexico, and studied art in Chicago before his fateful detour through New Orleans. The city's culture grabbed him the way it grabs everyone who's susceptible to it—completely and permanently. He set up shop and began creating the sculptures and architectural reliefs that would become landmarks.

His work is everywhere in New Orleans, though you might not realize it. The Fountain of the Four Winds at the New Orleans Lakefront Airport, built in 1937, is his—a stunning Art Deco piece that caused a scandal when it was unveiled because Alferez had the audacity to depict male nudity. In the 1930s, in a city that celebrated naked bodies during Mardi Gras, the sculpture of a naked man at the airport was apparently a bridge too far. The controversy, of course, only made the piece more famous.

He created relief work for Charity Hospital, that imposing Art Deco building that served as the medical safety net for generations of New Orleanians. He sculpted multiple works for City Park. And he created the Molly Marine statue—the first American sculpture to depict a woman in military uniform—which became a beloved landmark.

Many of Alferez's commissions came through the Works Progress Administration, FDR's Depression-era program that put artists to work. The WPA was responsible for an enormous amount of the public art in New Orleans, and Alferez was one of its most prolific beneficiaries. The program gave him the resources to fill the city with his vision, and he took full advantage.

Alferez worked and taught in New Orleans for the rest of his extraordinarily long life. Today, the Helis Foundation Enrique Alferez Sculpture Garden in the New Orleans Botanical Garden houses more than twenty of his works—a permanent tribute to the artist who got stranded in the city and spent the next seventy years making it more beautiful.

His story is a New Orleans immigration story. The city has always been shaped by people who arrived from somewhere else and found that something about the place matched something inside them. Alferez came from Mexico, ran out of money, and created art that generations of New Orleanians have grown up with without ever learning his name. It's time they did.