Blucifer is a public sculpture by Luis Jiménez with the actual title "Blue Mustang". It appears in all of its 32' high glory as you enter the Denver International Airport. The sculpture is puzzling and almost bad until you research the earlier work of Jiménez and realize the aesthetic and intent of such a piece. We could ask him in an interview but thanks to "Blue Mustang" he is not among the living. Luis Jiménez was killed by a section of the sculpture in his own studio. My research points to an accident while moving a section that led to it falling on the artist with fatal results. This has led into and fed conspiracy theories about the airport itself, a shelter for The New World Order and hideaway for outer space lizards. I will leave these areas of research for you to approach as you see fit.
I first met Blucifer a little more than a year ago. After my work was done in Colorado I briefly worked on a project in Baltimore and then moved on to a more involved project in St. Louis. It was here in St. Louis, Missouri that I had a second "Murder Sculpture" encounter.
Baltimore is the US city with the second highest murder rate. St. Louis is the US city with the highest murder rate, so as I left my brief visit to Baltimore to settle in for a longer, more involved project in St. Louis those statistics were not lost on me. The way the statistics worked their way into my life was swift and unexpected. Our first day visiting the site we would spend the next few months working on had us pass a public sculpture by John Henry. The recognizable style of the red abstract metal monster made me comment on it as we passed and I vowed to have some details the next morning.
That evening I looked up the sculpture, as well as other public works in St. Louis, and found that it was called "Treemonisha" and was part of his "Falling Cards" series of sculpture. I went further to research the name of the sculpture and found that it was named after the protagonist in Scott Joplin's "ragtime" opera of the same name. A strange story of education triumphing over superstition with conjurers and a supremely unusual part where the protagonist is almost put into a giant hornet nest......my attention faded and I was off to sleep in my hotel room.
The next morning when I brought up my findings during our ride in to work one of my coworkers informed me that she had seen on the news that someone was found murdered next to the sculpture earlier in the morning. As we passed "Treemonisha" that morning there was a bundle of flowers at its base marking the place where the body was found clearly visible.
Time passed swiftly in St. Louis as the project I worked on progressed towards opening day and I am happy to report we lost no persons from the crew in that time. The St. Louis Aquarium, retrofitted into the elegant Union Station is an ambitious move toward vitalizing the downtown area and I am happy to have worked on it. St. Louis, after all, kind of stole my heart. Near the end of my stay, during a long shift, I was asked by the Aquarium's curator to produce a quick background for an extremely rare blue lobster named Lord Stanley. I can not express what a joy it was to be asked to produce a small painting for this purpose. Even though it was simply fill in for the soft opening I was stoked!
Back to Colorado, I was asked to drive from Gulfport Mississippi to Colorado Springs to help complete fixes on the Cheyene Mountain Zoo. With hesitation I accepted the job ( at least I would not need to fly in during the COV-19 pandemic and see Blucifer glaring at me) and drove to Colorado. My main reason for going was unfinished business of my own at the site of Tesla's laboratory in Colorado Springs. There, no sign of the structure remains, but there is a plaque that I wanted to make rubbings of. I ended up making rubbings and an actual mold of Tesla's likeness on the bronze plaque.
