In this pencil sketch, Mendoza conceptualized a future mural that was a variation on a theme he’d painted earlier in his career entitled “The Tail in Madrid.” This one depicts the “Festival of the Sun” along Chicago’s Lake Shore Drive.

There is a more refined version of this drawing (see Art Gallery). You can see that the detailed, color version is a composite of great art that came before Mendoza, capturing and recombining artistic styles from multiple sources. Here, he reinterprets pre-Columbian motifs with a post-Impressionist color palette. There is also even an intentional flattening and vertical stacking of subject matter similar to old Japanese block prints.

Even though the final color drawing was never executed as a mural, you can see Mendoza brilliantly connecting all the aesthetic dots, so to speak.