In Birmingham’s Arlington-West End neighborhood, Elmwood Cemetery spans more than four hundred acres and serves as the final resting place of Alabamians such as Coach Bear Bryant and jazz musician Sun Ra. While many prominent individuals are buried at Elmwood, its most well-known structures are not gravestones.
From January through March 1938, Mexican artist Dionicio Rodríguez constructed a tree with a mushroom roof, a bridge with a Chinese lantern, and a bench made of roots for the cemetery. Wealthy developer John Jemison commissioned Rodríguez to create the structures out of his trademark faux-wood blend of concrete.
Rodríguez called his colored concrete structures trabajo rustico, Spanish for “rustic work.” With roots in nineteenth-century France, works of trabajo rustico or faux bois (faux wood) are made of concrete and cement with steel reinforcements. In the 1920s, Rodríguez and other Mexican immigrants introduced trabajo rustico to Texas. Rodríguez produced both public and private works in Alabama, Tennessee, Maryland, Illinois, Michigan, New Mexico, Arkansas, New York, and Washington, DC. He was especially busy during the Great Depression, as concrete was affordable and widely available.
The roofs on his mushroom-like structures resemble Mexican palapas, or roofs made of straw. For the one at Elmwood, Rodríguez envisioned a tree that stayed rooted after a great “cloudburst” washed the others away, becoming “a natural beach umbrella.” Rodríguez imagined that woodworkers created the nearby bench out of a tree struck by lightning. To protect the originality of the exact colors he used to mimic wood, Rodríguez mixed chemicals privately in a tent or in the trunk of his car.
Like his contemporary Frank Lloyd Wright, Rodríguez used color palettes in keeping with the natural environment and created his art based on an average human-size scale. Both Rodríguez and Wright began experimenting with concrete in the 1920s, with the most well-known example being Wright’s textile block homes in Los Angeles. Wright called concrete the “gutter rat” of materials, yet he challenged himself to create concrete structures that specifically evoked a sense of place.
Rodríguez was born in Toluca, Mexico in 1891. After moving to Mexico City, he developed his skills from working with concrete in construction. Rodríguez arrived in Texas in 1924 after spending time in Monterrey. When he suffered ill health and commissions slowed in the 1940s, he lived alone in a tree house in San Antonio, where much of his art remains today. He was a private person who was on the road most of the year. At the time of his death in 1955, he was listed as “widowed,” but no information exists on his spouse. He consistently employed others and bought new cars every year, even as the Great Depression raged on. Rodríguez often employed other men from Mexico, and the trabajo rustico style survives from being passed down by them.
As the author of two books on Rodríguez, art historian Patsy Pittman Light ranks his work with folk art landmarks like Br. Joseph Zoettl’s Ave Maria Grotto in Cullman and Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers in Los Angeles. Folk art is a testament to how human beings can transform simple materials into something beautiful, or in Rodríguez’s case, almost whimsical. Rodríguez never learned English and relied on others to translate, but he left a mark on the American landscape in the form of his artworks. While Rodríguez’s works in Memphis and Arkansas are on the National Register of Historic Places, his sculptures at Elmwood remain unlisted. Acknowledging Rodríguez’s Birmingham sculptures could qualify them for grant funding for upkeep and restoration.
This article first appeared in Alabama Heritage magazine, Issue 153, Summer 2024.
Ashley Steenson is a doctoral candidate at the University of Alabama. All photo courtesy of Laura Buchanan McElroy.
