Luis Ortiz Monasterio

[1][2] In 1920, he spent a year at a teacher’s training course at the Escuela Normal para Maestros while studying drawing at night at the Academy of San Carlos.

[2][3] In 1927, he participated in a workshop at the Escuela Libre de Escultura y Talla Directa founded by Guillermo Ruiz at the San Ildefonso College, which promoted sculpting Mexican themes and values into native rock.

[4] Ortiz Monasterio retired from his sculpting career in 1989, dying a year later at the age of 83 in Mexico City from multiple natural causes.

[2] In 1946 he participated in the International Sculpture Exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which acquired a work called Cabeza de mujer (1945).

[2][3] Posthumous tributes include one in 1992 at the OMR Gallery,[2] and a retrospective in 2011 at the Museo Casa Estudio Diego Rivera y Frida Kahlo.

[7] Ortiz Monasterio is of the generation of Mexican sculptors which includes Oliverio Martínez, Francisco Marín, Juan Cruz Reyes, Federico Cantú, Federico Canessi and Carlos Bracho, which adopted elements of Art Deco and Cubism, using figures from the working class and indigenous populations.

The first are monumental public works with historical themes, such as the Nezahualcoyotl Fountain in Chapultepec (1956) and the Plaza Cívica de la Unidad Indepedencia (1962).