Francisco Zuñiga
Tres Mujeres Caminando (Three Women Walking), 1981
Cast bronze
Gift of George and Virginia Ablah
Over the course of his career, Francisco Zuñiga frequently explored the female form in paintings, prints, and sculptures. In Tres Mujeres Caminando, or Three Women Walking, the artist seamlessly interweaves his interest in prehistoric, Mexican, and Western traditions.
The majority of figurative sculpture and cave paintings from Prehistory feature women, and those women often possess an amplitude uncommon in more contemporary images. Zuñiga’s three women walking, likewise, display stockier proportions, and even adiposity. Donald Holden characterized them as “nameless heroines of Mexico's proletarian art: barefoot Indian women with thick torsos, solid limbs, and dresses that fall in . . . big folds.” Zuñiga likely based the figures on local models he saw in his Mexico City home, and may have been thinking about rotund Olmec figurines, yet he removes any specific identifiers: the women’s clothes are generic garments meant to display the body and captures the ripples of motion; they wear no specific hats or shoes; they don’t hold goods or products that would identify a region or time period, and so forth. This universalizes the figures, and allows us to read them as part of many traditions.For instance, the trope of three women together suggests that they might be incarnations of the Three Graces of Greek mythology. Their disparate ages relate to the three ages of man, or perhaps the pagan conception of the maiden, mother, and crone.Zuñiga may also be responding to Western sculptural tradition, where depictions of women tend to be poised and restrained in movement, if not static. They often lack a narrative component. You can find examples on this sculpture tour, by artists such as Gerhard Marcks and William Zorach. By contrast, Zuñiga makes his monumental figures stride across the base, emphasizing their forward motion with the swirls of drapery around their feet. The artist also tempts us with an intriguing and enigmatic narrative. He places the life-size figures on the ground, instead of raising them on a pedestal. At high traffic times of the day, they blend into the campus crowds, becoming part of our group.