Rogelio Tijerina lives half the year in Chicago and the other half with his wife and five children on a 180-acre cattle ranch in Bayview, Texas, about ten miles west of South Padre Island. He raises Simbrahs, a cross between docile, easy-calving Simmentals and sturdy, heat-resistant Brahmans, and at any given time he has a herd of around 40 freely roaming about. The livestock is sold for meat, but that’s not what keeps the operation going. “There’s no money in ranching,” he says. A sculptor and former teacher at the School of the Art Institute, Tijerina breeds his cattle as models. “They lead a good life as an art project. One cast bull feeds a lot of hungry cattle.”
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The idea of breeding models came to Tijerina in 1998, after he bought a bull for casting at auction. “It was amazing how they’d bred him for loin and muscle, bred out all the fat. He looked like he was on steroids. I called him Hercules, but soon learned he was friendly, good-natured–a gentle giant. I couldn’t bring myself to cast him, but it struck me I could easily reproduce him, and then cast his offspring. I’d work with Mother Nature to create art.” When he casts an animal, especially one he’s raised, Tijerina pays special attention to “shape and form and expression–like contentment, fear, resistance, life, death–drawn from the experience of living with and getting to know the animal for several years.” He also leaves his weld marks visible on his sculptures, exposing the production process. “As a result, some of my pieces resemble 3-D butcher’s diagrams.”
“Living in a city for the first time, I’d go deer hunting to get away,” Tijerina says. “I like the rituals of deer hunting–camping out, cooking–but usually stop short of shooting the deer. I’m happy to harvest what I consume, but not more than I need and not for sport.” On those trips he spent a lot of time thinking about his childhood experiences on the ranch, and what role domestic animals play in a society so alienated from them. “We no longer use horses for transportation, just recreation. We eat processed and packaged milk and meat but never think of the animals they came from. We’re disconnected from the life cycle of domestic animals, the natural cycle of life and death.” With that in mind Tijerina created an installation for his graduate panel at the Art Institute–which included sculptors John Buck and Deborah Butterfield–that was based on his grandmother’s recipe for cabrito en sangre. He procured a young goat from a friend in Wisconsin, slaughtered it, cast it in bronze, and served its meat to the critics, who sat on a sheepskin rug he’d tanned. The installation also featured jewelry boxes, necklaces, bracelets, and earrings, all of which were made from the goat’s skin and organs. Shortly after that the school offered Tijerina a teaching job.
