One Jesse Shaw exists as a talented but humble print artist and TAMIU art professor — a Tennessee transplant turned proud Laredoan — whose high contrast and intricate print work illustrates a complex and multi-faceted American history, and whose excitement fills the room as he shares his love of artistic expression and a devout passion for teaching art to first generation students.
The other Shaw walks this world as a loud and slightly blundering wrestling persona, George Washington Junior (GWJ), Laredo’s ideal heel. Replete with full revolutionary war regalia and a white wig, GWJ roams the streets of Laredo as a high society reject determined to enter Laredo’s upper echelons and infiltrate the elite Country Club, at which point he will declare “golf and brunch for all,” opening doors and many possibilities, he believes, for all Laredoans.
These two artistic mediums that appear vastly different on the surface allow these Jesse Shaws to exist as one in a dramatic interplay between ego and alter ego
Eager to meet this enigmatic creator, I ventured to the TAMIU Print Shop to sit down with this accomplished resident artist, and to meet the man of cravats and colonial-era wigs.
The Print Shop itself is a work of art, its walls lined with striking prints, its shelves filled with brightly colored ink and paints. On large tables, student print projects have been carefully placed to dry.
Shaw’s energy was palpable. He led me to a massive silk-screening apparatus and then to an anvil-looking printing press, with boxes of wooden stamps of letters and symbols. He explained excitedly how he was able to acquire this equipment through university and grant funding on his mission to expand his department to create capable and professional artists.
“We publish artists here!” he proclaimed. “Students who are part of the program, or even students that volunteer, should be able to walk into a shop and not feel uncomfortable at all to walk in and be ready to work.”
The publishing he speaks of is Tarantula Press, a creative research program he developed in which students assist in research and fine art print publishing of nationally and internationally known artists. “Students gain professional experience in print and fine arts publishing,” he said.
The Tarantula icon, he explained, was drawn from a piece of his ongoing opus, The American Epic; a series of layered and intricate linocut prints that he began in 2008, with the goal of producing 50 high contrast prints. With 31 prints completed thus far, this series explores the complexities of American history through social analysis, satire, and the use of animals and nature to depict very human stories and histories.
Unfurling several of these prints, Shaw showed me the first one he created when he moved to the border— an amalgamation of his initial lived experiences in the Laredo summer: his skin melting in the dry heat; the landscape’s imported palm trees, that like him are transplants; tongue waggers who spread fear and falsehoods about the borderlands; and the giant tarantula, mascot and namesake of the Print Shop’s research and printing program.
Sharing his journey into the art world, Shaw explained that he was raised in a military family, eventually settling in the small town of Guthrie, Kentucky, where he would doodle comic books but had zero art exposure. He entered school as a non-traditional student, unsure of where he was headed, but trusting something bigger was out there for him.
His eyes danced when spoke of his first art class and the resulting moment of transformation. “I felt at home in that department and started realizing, these are my people, this is what I should be doing. There was an entire art world that I didn’t understand or know about.”
He pushed into this new world with all his might, challenging himself by exploring a myriad of artistic foundations, ceramics, and sculpture until the “Aha!” moment when he took his first printmaking class. “When I made my first linocut, I knew this is what I had been looking for,” he said.
The art world had been looking for him as well, and he was admitted to the Rhode Island School of Design, hoping to teach. He taught for five years at Austin Peay State University, two as an adjunct and three as a visiting professor before working for Durham Press in Pennsylvania, a renowned printshop founded by Jean-Paul Russel, who publishes print and silk screen art and artists from around the world. Publishing prints for artists by day, and creating his own pieces by night, Shaw grew as an artist, showing his print pieces around the country and leading student workshops..
Unable to escape the call to teach, he began seeking a teaching position that primarily served first-generation art students like himself, eventually finding himself in Laredo in 2018, where he began to create based on the new world around him.
As he learned more about his new home, he found himself moved not only by his new life on the border, but particularly by the George Washington Birthday Celebration. Inspired by the vulnerable one-man-show performed by TAMIU dance professor, Timothy Rubel, Shaw wanted to expand access to the arts in the most Laredo way he could imagine and to invite everyone to partake in this rich and vibrant creative world.
It occurred to him that wrestling was the perfect medium for such a project, and George Washington Junior was born, quickly becoming a local internet viral sensation.
This larger-than-life character invited Laredo not just to watch and observe — but to take part in and interact with his ‘shock and awe’ performance pieces. He stormed the Martha Fenstermaker Fine Arts Gallery at Laredo College, splattering tomato sauce on a portrait of himself. He staged a surprise wrestling match at the faculty art show on the floor of the gallery, witnessed by the patrons of the arts who stood in attendance. He transformed himself into a vampire during one Halloween punk rock wrestling match, was tarred and feathered in a humiliating defeat in another, and commanded a parade float along with Five Star Wrestling in the 2026 Washington’s Birthday Parade, establishing their place among the elite.
The crux of his character lives where the ego and the alter ego find common ground. Because despite GWJ’s pompous, grousing, and bumbling persona, he stands unwavering in his colonial britches as a champion of accessibility and promoter of the arts in whatever form they may manifest, inviting spectators to the art gallery every chance he gets.
When asked about bringing art to the wrestling fans and wrestling fans to the art world Shaw mischievously exclaimed, “This was always the plan!”
Shaw’s work, in both print and performance, are an invitation to students to become trained artists and to the community to explore a world that for many seemed exclusive or elusive. All are invited to wrestle with their own identities through these works to fortify what we know is true, to honor our identity and that of those who came before us, and to question those parts of our pasts and histories that merit evaluation and retrospection.
In the fall of 2026, GWJ will grace the silver screen in a full-length feature film that documents the anti-hero’s comic exploits and Shaw’s unique version of the history of the George Washington Birthday Celebration, as seen through his own absurdist lens.
When Shaw speaks, it is readily apparent that what first appears to be a drastic difference between carving linocuts and staging lucha libre wrestling matches exists rather as a passionate common purpose that invites everyone to participate in the arts. Whether it’s art lovers in a gallery, wrestling and social media fans, students in a classroom, or the entire city of Laredo, Shaw’s lifeblood ignites by sharing the arts with others and inviting them into the world he fell in love with, effusively proclaimed as:
“When you love something, you just want to share it with everybody!”
(Hannah Frey is a freelance writer, student, partner, and advocate for the disenfranchised. Not originally from Laredo, she moved to the border in 2014 with her children, quickly falling in love with her new community that she proudly calls home. Her writing ranges from academic research to trauma-informed community columns to stories about the arts. She is consistently grateful for the opportunity to share her work with the community that she loves so dearly.)
Season 1 of George Washington Jr.
