The sculptor Octavio Medellín, born in 1907 in Matehuala, Mexico, and raised in San Antonio, Texas, moved back and forth between the two places his entire life. After attending the San Antonio Art School in the 1920s, Medellín returned to Mexico to study the culture and history of the Gulf Coast. In the 1930s, during a stint in Texas, he became part of the Dallas Nine, a group of painters, printmakers, and sculptors who took the Southwest as inspiration. Medellín looked farther south than the others, to the ancient ruins and sculptures of the Mayans and Toltec Indians. “I went to Mexico to see art,” he said. “Actually, the art was the people.” His work is figurative: elongated busts, blocky men done in red sandstone, limestone couples. Thirty Medellín sculptures, as well as his experiments with metal, glass, and printmaking, are part of the first museum retrospective on this artist, who died in 1999. —Jensen Davis