With our main studio at the Wye in Bishop, we see a lot of strange cargos headed through town. With few overpasses and lots of open road, Highway 6 is very commonly used road for oversized truck loads. Sometimes those loads catch the eye, as one did Tuesday night. A thirty foot long white and red horse like structure sat out on the side of the highway.

After some legwork today it was confirmed that the cargo was the enormous sculpture that killed artist Luis Jimenez in 2006.

The cargo was wrapped in white plastic taped together with red tape, which made it look like a giant horse made out of candy cane. The truck driver must have headed into town for dinner as he was not around when I stopped by to film the load. Calls to the trucking company were unsuccessful. The cargo didn’t need an escort, so the Highway Patrol didn’t know what it was.

The one clue was what appeared to be a custom steel frame to hold the giant horse which read save mustang sculpture handling rig. Internet searches and a few phone calls lead me to believe that this cargo is the fiery blue thirty foot mustang sculpture planned to be installed at the Denver Airport. If this does turn out to be the case, its a thirty foot fiberglass mustang that killed New Mexico Artist Luis Jimenez.

A website called Arts Houston reported that a piece of the large sculpture fell on Luis Jimenez two years ago, killing him. His assistant and sons planned to finish the piece and deliver it to the Denver Airport this year.

Officials at the Denver Airport confirmed that the Cargo was indeed the tragic sculpture called Mustang. Until recently the sculpture was in three pieces in the artists studio in Hondo New Mexico. Airport Engineers sent the sculpture to a company in American Canyon California to add internal strengthening so that the sculpture can handle the high winds in Denver. Mustang was on its way to its new home when it stopped in our neck of the woods for the night.

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