Saturday March 9th, 2019 – We drove into El Paso to find the Surreal Art Gallery and Sculpture Garden. We met the artist Ho Baron at his home and he was kind enough to give us a tour. Ho was generous with his time and explained how his pieces came to be. The sculptures were definitely surreal. He has smaller works that are made with dolls that are certainly unusual! We spent at least an hour visiting with Ho, who has 2 Masters degrees and has traveled to 40 countries as well as being in the Peace Corp. 

He published a book of his work (which we happily purchased) and signed it for us. If you want to see more about him and his unusual art you can go to hobaron.com and learn all about him.

It was a great stop for a unique opportunity. I don’t think in our travels we’ve seen anything quite like his work. It was an experience to remember.

Our next stop was Historic Downtown El Paso. There’s a lovely old theater there. The Plaza Theater was presenting Evita and it was nice to see the crowd all dressed up for the theater presentation.

Since it was an Art Day we walked to the El Paso Museum of Art and took in centuries old paintings, contemporary artists and youth art. It wasn’t a huge museum but it certainly filled the bill. If you look closely at the black and white mural you can get a sense of its size – that’s me at the foot of it.

We took a quick trip through El Centro at the edge of downtown. The buildings were colorful and the stores fronts full of all kinds of stuff from over the border. Lucky’s limited storage keeps shopping to a minimum for us so we just took a look and called it a day.

Side Note:  81% of El Paso’s population is Hispanic or Latino. El Paso has an estimated population of 679,000. That’s a population density of 2,500 people per square mile! Just across the Border is Juárez, Mexico which is #20 on the top 50 Highest Murder Rates in a non-warring country. Yet El Paso, a stones throw away has a murder rate of 2.9 per 100,000. St Lois Missouri in comparison was 64.9 per 100,000. Since 1997 El Paso has been ranked one of the top 3 safest cities.

The photo above is a view of El Paso from the Scenic Drive Overlook.