Southwestern Historical Quarterly

In Artisans of Trabajo Rústico, Patsy Pittman Light continues her exploration of the creative tradition of faux bois, also known as trabajo rústico. Her first volume on the subject was Capturing Nature: The Cement Sculpture of Dionicio Rodríguez (Texas A&M University Press, 2008). In the first of four chapters, Light discusses the origins of this craft—mimicking nature using concrete on a steel armature—as being rooted in eighteenth-century English naturalistic gardens. Nineteenth-century industrial advances in concrete and steel manufacture fueled the building industry and spread to the European continent, taking with it the handmade concrete art still seen there today. The trend then followed European immigrants to Argentina, where ornate garden designs became popular and influenced gardens in neighboring South American countries.

Light also lightly touches on the tradition's development in Mexico as her primary interest, the Mexican artisan Dionicio Rodríguez, was born in Toluca de Lerdo, Mexico. It can be presumed that the Mexican Revolution complicates the story, and that there is more work to be done in this area of research. Although little information is available on Rodríguez's early life and influences, his work in San Antonio in the 1920s was the beginning of a prolific period of activity, inspiring Rodríguez's contemporaries and others to take up the craft, resulting in projects such as furniture, railings, and other garden structures throughout the United States.

Beautiful photographs by Kent Rush provide an invaluable resource comprising decades of visual documentation of many objects. Rush, an artist and former professor of art at the University of Texas at San Antonio, shows an extensive range of trabajo rústico from public, private, and government sites in San Antonio and its surrounding small towns and nearby ranches, then north to Austin, west to Uvalde, south to coastal Texas, and beyond. For the book's second chapter, he also contributes an illustrated introduction to the craft, including the process, tools, and approaches to joinery, surface texture, and color. [End Page 598]

The third chapter catalogs nineteen artisans and their work. These men and women originate from Mexico, Texas, New Mexico, Michigan, California, and New York and were born from the late 1800s until as recently as the 1970s. Some were fleeing the tumultuous Mexican Revolution and its aftermath or inherited the craft from Mexican family or friends. Others came to the art simply by seeing it. They reflect a diverse range of backgrounds—laborers, woodworkers, artists, and scholars.

The book's final chapter (comprising nearly half the book) is a magnificent gallery of full-page photographs representing "a sampling of a wide variety of objects, configurations, styles, textures, and coloration in the works of artisans who were trained as assistants by Dionicio Rodríguez, or directly or indirectly influenced by him" (93). Rodríguez is the first known artist to bring trabajo rústico to the United States from Mexico, with his first commission occurring around 1924 in San Antonio. Through the authors' research, we now see the reverberations of Rodríguez's hand and imagination as it influences the craft of trabajo rústico.

Unfortunately, one of the admitted difficulties in documenting this history is proper identification of the work, as it was often left unsigned and undated. But there is a beauty nevertheless to even the anonymous artists' work in the book.

The value of Artisans is that it reveals the art of trabajo rústico, although labor intensive and highly ambitious, as an endeavor of human scale beloved by its artisans and greatly appreciated by its viewers. As it traversed the globe, from the elite gardens of Europe and South America, and perhaps through the civil unrest of the Mexican Revolution, this unique folk expression evolved as it entered the United States with the immigrants who brought it here and blossomed with the artisans who have continued its legacy.