Photo By Gail

If you think television has always been a little too obsessed with beauty ideals, you’re not wrong — and artist Luis Jiménez saw it coming from a mile away. His sculpture Blond TV Image (1967) captures that uneasy relationship between media, technology, and the female form with biting humor and Pop-era flair.

At first glance, the work looks almost cartoonish: a fiberglass bust of a blond woman fused with a television set.  It’s funny, a little kitschy, and also vaguely unsettling — like a beauty queen who’s somehow become one with the screen she’s appearing on— but that’s exactly the point. In this piece, Jiménez turns the glamour of the TV image back on itself, exposing how 1960s media culture transformed women into living, breathing advertisements for the American dream.

Jiménez, who was born in Texas in 1940 to Mexican-American parents, is best known for his monumental, vividly painted public sculptures that celebrate Chicano identity and working-class life in the American Southwest. Blond TV Image comes from an earlier period in his career, when he was living in New York and experimenting with Pop Art’s shiny surfaces and surreal juxtapositions. Here, fiberglass — a material associated with cars, signage, and other icons of consumer culture — becomes the skin of a hybrid being: part woman, part machine, and all commentary.

The sculpture was reportedly modeled on the artist’s then-wife and reflects his interest in how television projected ideals of feminine beauty directly into American homes. It’s both seductive and critical: the blond woman is the image and the object, the broadcast and the broadcast receiver. Half pin-up, half appliance, she’s a perfect emblem of a culture that can’t tell the difference between desire and display.

Photographed at the Whitney Museum as Part of the  Exhibit Sixties Surreal, on View Through January 19,  2026.