Michael Tracy, Artist Who Helped Restore a Texas Border Town, Dies at 80

Michael Tracy, a flamboyant artist inspired by religion, violence and sensuality who dedicated much of his life to preserving neglected 19th-century architecture on the Texas-Mexico border, died on June 15 at his studio compound in San Ygnacio, Texas. He was 80.

Christopher Rincón, the executive director of the River Pierce Foundation, Mr. Tracy ’s historic preservation organization, said the cause was a heart attack.

Mr. Tracy’s baroque fusions of bright paint, wood, metals, knives, swords, religious images, hair, blood, urine, photographs and other detritus were in vogue 40 years ago; he had exhibitions in New York, Houston, San Francisco and elsewhere. His work was “as enthralling as it is gross,” the critic Bill Berkson wrote in Artforum of one such exhibit in 1989. Mr. Tracy once appeared on the magazine’s cover.

But by 2014 he had faded from view; that year he was described by the New York Times critic Roberta Smith as a “little-known artist from Texas who made torn and cut paintings and fetishlike sculptures fraught with intimations of religion and violence.”

As his fame in the art world diminished and his relations with gallery owners became prickly, Mr. Tracy turned his attention to the lonely spot on the U.S.-Mexico border that he had adopted as his workplace in 1978: San Ygnacio, a tiny, empty town on the Rio Grande, unique in its assemblage of mid-19th-century Mexican ranch-vernacular buildings.