Giants in the Park: Alebrijes and Nahuales Take Over Discovery Green

Beginning September 15 and running through October 18, eight monumental sculptures have taken up residence across Discovery Green's twelve acres in downtown Houston. Each one stands roughly twenty feet tall, an almost unbelievable scale for a tradition that usually lives on a shelf or a mantel. The exhibition, called Fantastic Animals from México: Alebrijes and Nahuales, was timed to open alongside Hispanic Heritage Month, and it turns the park into an open-air gallery of the same fantastical creatures we work with every day at Sandia Folk, just blown up to the size of a small building.

For anyone unfamiliar with the tradition, alebrijes are the brightly colored, hybrid animal spirits first popularized by Mexico City artist Pedro Linares in the 1930s, after a fever dream filled with impossible creatures. Nahuales come from a different, older thread of Mesoamerican belief: the idea that every person has an animal counterpart, a spirit guide that can shift between human and animal form.

Oaxacan wood carvers took both ideas and made them their own, and what you see at Discovery Green are enlarged reproductions of original works by the very Oaxacan artisan families whose smaller, hand-carved pieces fill our gallery.

To survive a month outdoors at twenty feet tall, each sculpture was fabricated in fiberglass by @Artsumex, translating designs that normally live in carved copal wood into a material built to withstand Houston's late-summer sun and rain.

Each figure is also lit from within, so the park takes on a different character after dark, the same folk-art color palette glowing rather than simply catching daylight.

LionBull, by Leonardo Linares, grandson of alebrije originator Pedro Linares.

The eight sculptures each carry a story, and if you collect with us, a few of these names will feel close to home.

Adrian Xuana's Dog may be the most recognizable of the group, a skeletal figure painted almost entirely in black with white bone markings across its ribs and legs, known as the "death dog" and drawn from more than forty years of Xuana's carving experience.

Maria Jimenez's Rabbit is just as unmistakable, painted with the classic doves, butterflies, and flowers that mark her work, standing tall and cradling a slice of watermelon nearly as big as its own head.

Margarito Melchor's Armadillo, its shell bursting with pattern, comes from an artist who pioneered Oaxacan woodcarving using ordinary farm tools.

Leonardo Linares contributed two papier-mâché pieces, Catbird and LionBull, a fanged, horned, winged creature that carries his family's original technique to a monumental scale.

 Efrain Fuentes built a Coyote drawn from Zapotec motifs found at Monte Albán, and his sister is Julia Fuentes, whose husband, Jose Juan Melchor, carves the pieces we carry from that family, so a version of this same coyote's bloodline sits on our shelves at a fraction of the size.

Angelico Jimenez, who created the mystical Cat Nahual, is the son of Manuel Jimenez Ramirez, the same family line that produced Armando Jimenez, another artist whose work has passed through our hands.

The Rabbit, by Maria Jimenez of San Martín Tilcajete, cradling a slice of watermelon, sandía, patterned in flowers and doves.

Maria Jimenez's Rabbit is worth lingering on for reasons beyond its size. Covered in the same delicately painted butterflies and flowers as her smaller work, it stands cradling a slice of watermelon nearly as big as its own head. We can't take credit for the coincidence, but a twenty-foot alebrije holding a sandía is about as good an omen as a folk art gallery named Sandia Folk could ask for.

 The Dog, by Adrian Xuana of San Martín Tilcajete, known as the "skeleton dog," is painted in bone-white patterns over black.

Adrian Xuana's Dog closes out the set spectacularly. Painted almost entirely in black with white bone markings across its legs and ribs, it represents the soul's journey to the underworld, a guide rather than a guardian. Xuana has more than forty years of carving experience behind a piece like this, and the restraint of the palette, so different from the riot of color on the Rabbit or LionBull, makes it one of the most striking figures in the park.

If you were downtown for the opening reception on September 17, you may have had the rare chance to meet some of the artists themselves, several of whom traveled from Oaxaca to Houston for the unveiling. It's not often that the makers of a tradition this old get to stand beside a twenty-foot version of their own work, in another country, watching people encounter it for the first time.

The Coyote, by Efraín Fuentes and Silvia Gómez of San Martín Tilcajete, worked in fine, very detailed geometric linework drawn from Zapotec design traditions..

There's something moving about seeing this craft at that size. The wood carving and papier-mâché traditions we associate with tabletop pieces are magnified into something you can walk under and stand beside. 

It's a reminder that the artisans behind these figures aren't just making decorative objects. They're working in a living visual language that can scale from a six-inch carving to a twenty-foot public monument without losing what makes it recognizable: the mixture of menace and warmth, the impossible color combinations, the sense that the animal in front of you might, at any moment, become something else.

Most of our collectors aren't in Houston, and that's the real point of an installation like this one. It puts a spotlight, briefly and publicly, on families whose work usually reaches people quietly, one hand-carved piece at a time, shipped from a workshop in Oaxaca to a home somewhere else entirely. You don't need to stand under the Coyote to own a piece carved by the same hands that shaped it, or to bring home a creature from the same lineage as the Cat Nahual. The exhibition closes October 18. The families behind it keep carving long after.