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In 1973, sculptor Antonio Medina checks his Mayan-like statues that would grace Karam’s Mexican Restaurant.

In this 2008 photo, Ruben Valadez ties down the statue of Choc Mool as workers move statues from the premises of the former Karam's Mexican Restaurant. The statues were the works of the late Antonio Medina, a Mexican sculptor whose other pieces include the Sea Island Jolly Jack statue.

A photograph of the late artist Antonio Medina at age 18. Medina created the famous Jolly Jack statue outside the original Sea Island location behind North Star Mall, plus other memorable statuary around San Antonio.

The giant 1976 plaque of Gen. Douglas MacArthur at MacArthur High School, shown Jan. 1, 2022, was the work of Antonio Medina. The late Mexican sculptor also crafted the Jolly Jack statue for Sea Island Shrimp House and the Mayan-like warrior statues that graced the original Karam's Mexican Restaurant.

Medina created the life-size buffalo sculpture at Fox Tech High School model in the 1970s.

Back in the 1980s when Marc Dominguez and Tony Flores were students at MacArthur High School, the cousins often told classmates that their grandfather created the giant face of Gen. Douglas MacArthur that watched over the student body.

“And they wouldn’t believe us,” said Dominguez, now a San Antonio real estate broker.

Believe it. Not only did their grandfather Antonio Medina make that 7-by-14-foot plaque of the armed forces leader, he also was responsible for some of San Antonio’s most memorable sculptures of the past and present.

During his roughly 40 years in San Antonio, Medina sculpted such memorable bygone works as the Mayan-like statues at the former Karam’s Mexican Restaurant on North Zarzamora Street and the Grecian statues of the Four Seasons that graced the indoor fountain of the former Central Park Mall.

Then there are the pieces that still turn heads after so many decades: that massive face of MacArthur from the late 1970s, now above the school’s entrance, and the life-size bronze buffalo at Fox Tech High School. What is perhaps Medina’s most recognizable Alamo City work, the 10-foot-tall statue of Jolly Jack, has been a curbside fixture at the original Sea Island Shrimp House since 1965.

On ExpressNews.com: Jolly Jack has been welcoming diners to Sea Island Shrimp House in San Antonio for more than 50 years

No wonder Dominguez and Flores say their granddad, who died in Mexico in 1993, was the most famous sculptor in San Antonio no one’s ever heard of.

“I want to say he was probably one of the more known ‘unknown’ artists,” Dominguez said. “He was one of the artists that made little things around San Antonio special and brought character around the city.”

“It’s really nostalgic for other people,” said Flores, a San Antonio Realtor. “People talk about memories of things like that. I think it’s really (dear) to me that he was part of that, even though you don’t really see his name on those things.”

The original 1965 statue of Jolly Jack still shows his catch outside the Sea Island Shrimp House behind North Star Mall. The statue was the work of Antonio Medina.

Medina first made a name for himself in Mexico in the 1930s. In a 1973 San Antonio Light article, the Jalisco-born artist said he learned his craft the hard way by practically working for free for a sculptor in La Barca, Jalisco, so he could attend a school there for stone artisans.

Soon Medina was crafting ornate stone work in Guadalajara and Monterrey. Then in 1950, he moved to San Antonio and took a job with Redondo Manufacturing, an architectural precast concrete producer in Converse that’s been in business since 1910.

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Back in the ’50s, Redondo operated in San Antonio on West Poplar Street. By 1954, Medina was the stone-casting company’s “head man in a group of just three model-makers,” according to a Light article that year. Medina later established his own shop just west of downtown on North San Marcos Street.

One of Medina’s first big works in San Antonio was his Jolly Jack statue. Sea Island business partner Henry Reed came up with the idea for the galley boy character. Medina’s sculpture was a realistic figure, which became more cartoonish when it was repainted.

Medina’s next major work popped up a few years later just up the road. When Central Park Mall opened in 1968, the new shopping mall across the street from North Star Mall boasted a stunning ground-floor fountain with a Greek goddess statue representing spring. Statues for summer, fall and winter came later.

“He did all those statues just looking at a picture,” said his daughter Laura Medina. “He was a master at what he did.”

A 28-horse carousel replaced the Central Park fountain in 1991, and the mall closed in 2001.

A Jolly Jack bowl sculpt by Antonio Medina. The late artist created the famous Jolly Jack statue outside the original Sea Island location behind North Star Mall, plus other memorable statuary around San Antonio.

Perhaps Medina’s best-known work while they stood were the statues of Mesoamerican warriors that guarded the so-called “Mayan Garden” at Karam’s.

Medina initially designed the statues in 1973 for La Piramede, a restaurant and museum planned for the city’s North Side. He based the figures on those of the Pyramid of Quetzalcoatl in Tula, Mexico. La Piramede never opened, but Ralph Karam scooped up the statues for the West Side restaurant he founded with his wife, Josephine, in 1946.

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Medina’s statues enjoyed the spotlight at Karam’s. In addition to appearing in countless family photos, they also pop up in in the 1997 movie “Selena” starring Jennifer Lopez.

After Karam’s closed in 2008, most of the statues ended up in storage at the Land Heritage Institute, a San Antonio conservation museum, though one of them stands in Hemisfair downtown.

Medina worked well into his 60s, sculpting just about anything from statutes to birdbaths in his customary work uniform of khakis and a white T-shirt. Dominguez said he also still sees his grandfather’s handiwork on older pier-and-beam homes in San Antonio that bear Medina’s decorative concrete vents.

Dominguez believes Medina retired in the late 1980s soon after remarrying. He then moved back to Mexico, where he died in 1993 at age 81.

Shown here in 1985, the original lower-level water fountain at Central Park Mall featured Greek-like depictions of the Four Seasons by sculptor Antonio Medina.

Flores said he remembers running around Medina’s studio as a kid in the 1970s and seeing the buffalo that ended up at Fox Tech. His grandfather’s sculptures no doubt remind other San Antonians of their childhoods, he added, including the thousands of MacArthur graduates like him who literally looked up to his work all through high school.

Now Flores hopes more people will know Medina’s name as well as his work.

“He wasn’t the kind of person who would put himself in the spotlight,” Flores said. “But just knowing that he was able to do these very different types of artwork and for him to have his name out there would be great.”

rguzman@express-news.net | Twitter: @reneguz

René A. Guzman writes about geek and pop culture as well as consumer gadgets and technology. Before joining the Express-News in December 1998, the San Antonio native co-owned a college humor magazine named Bitter, for which he wrote, designed and edited, as well as distributed at various campuses and businesses citywide.