Hog Wild: The Pig as a Symbol and Object

Victoria College Fine Arts Gallery, March 12-April 10, 2026

Pigs have a habit of popping up. They appear in droves across rural Southwest America, where growing populations contribute to environmental damage, and consequentially, to new economic opportunities in the form of helicopter hog hunts. They’re also enduring icons in the landscape of American popular culture, home to figures like Piglet, Porky, and Miss Piggy, a porcine embodiment of vanity and charm. The pig is a figure capable of holding seemingly incompatible meanings like pest and commodity, environmental threat and cultural icon, object of affection and source of disgust.

I first envisioned Hog Wild as a snapshot of what pigs symbolize today, particularly in a place like Victoria, Texas. Known as “The Crossroads” for its location roughly an hour and a half from Austin, San Antonio, and Houston, Victoria is home to 60,000 people. Here, consumer culture reigns, and the mall is as popular an attraction as in its heyday in the 90’s. While some residents have participated in hog hunts or raised pigs through 4-H programs, most local’s connection to the nuisance is the unfortunate encounter with its body while driving on one of the interstates out of town. It is precisely through this commonality and disregard that the pig becomes a way to consider the values and contradictions embedded in local culture.

Consumption, filth, and the grotesque are expected themes for an exhibition centered on animals that are dirty, ugly, deadly, hunted, and eaten. These associations are immediately evident in a taxidermy boar’s head, loaned by a local hunter and prominently displayed on the gallery’s back wall.  Framing the head on either side are expressions of affection, humor, and familiarity. Local elementary school children were tasked to create “pig inspired artworks,” and a selection displayed in the gallery included a whimsical rendition of bacon, a piglet who loves pork appropriately named Hannibal Lecter, an outdoor scene of hog dogs cornering a boar and drawing blood on its ear, and a rather seductive-looking hot pink pig in a tight apron. 

Two Victoria College staff contributions more clearly oscillate between the endearing and the grotesque. One shared portraits of their beloved Starbuck, a pot bellied pet, and one supplied a boar skull from their collection, complete with process photos demonstrating how to skin a pig head. The skinning process was a means to an end, in order to collect the bones as a commemoration to life, and the photographs further record this process, albeit in gruesome detail. This juxtaposition between care and brutality reinforces broader thematic tensions in the exhibition. 

From a distance, the satiny, powder pink glaze on sculptor Lalana Fedroshack’s ceramic pig creates a soft appearance, like a baby’s skin. The life-size swine stands on a floor pedestal just right of center in the cube gallery. The innocence perceived from a distance can no longer be experienced once confronted up close, as its red eyes and exaggerated skin folds are too unsettling. Fedorshack’s piece is simultaneously familiar and repulsive. The work provokes many of the same reactions we have toward other people, drawing attention to our desire for connection and empathy while confronting us with qualities we often reject in ourselves. In this way, the pig becomes less a subject than a mirror. Like the pigs in Orwell’s Animal Farm, who gradually collapse the distinction between human and animal, the pig comes to embody traits we often reject in ourselves such as greed, a fascination with violence, and the taboo nature of sexuality. These contradictions sit at the core of the exhibition’s inquiry, raising questions about where the boundaries between human and animal truly lie and what happens when those boundaries are crossed altogether.

Sarah Zimmerman approaches this topic headon. In her photograph, a self portrait, she is wearing a handsewn dress made from pig skin. When I spoke to Sarah about her work, she mentioned her move into a more rural “John Deer” loving land at a formative age, which occurred at the same time her family transitioned into a more religious, conservative value system. This biographical context informs the layered tensions present in her work. In Zimmerman’s photograph, she is centered in a thrift boutique with mannequin heads, hats, and mirrors surrounding her. Her pig skin dress is translucent and her nude figure is thinly veiled underneath. She is looking directly at the viewer while the mannequins’ eyes point toward her and reflect in the mirror. The image suggests a multiplicity view of self alongside anxiety of being perceived. 

  Zimmerman’s process of sewing sheer dresses out of pig skin and wearing them embody the idea of being in a different layer of skin, one that appears translucent and open but also uncomfortable and out of place. Paired with the physical blouse and skirt, this installation has an intimacy and openness, taking up the full back wall of the gallery but displayed in a way that feels domestic and set for a singular viewer. The scale contrasts with its personal tone, inviting both distance and closeness. An additional piece by Zimmerman, a pig skin coin purse, with a cheekily opened clam clasp, sits atop a pedestal nearby. Coins are dispersed within and around the opening of this untraditional piggy bank, capturing the physicality of pigs associated with consumption, and specifically with consumerism and coins. 

The piggybank is probably one of the most iconic pigs to ever exist. Sam Chumley’s eclectic piggy bank recalls a farmhouse style but is embellished with an American Traditional tattoo design. The top half of the rustic form has been dipped in a white glaze, with swirling, painted imagery of a skull on one side and the word DOOM in comic book font on the other. Below the belly, the raw, red clay surface is exposed. Chumley’s background in tattooing informs the surface treatment of this piece, and interestingly puts this folksy work in conversation with contemporary artist Wil Devloye, an artist who tattoos live pigs and sells their stuffed bodies and hides once they are deceased. Tattooing draws attention to the flesh, a boundary layer that separates the self from the external, and the human desire to adorn and inscribe our own identity to it. The piggybank, as a physical container for coins, and conceptually a space for savings, aspirations, and dreams, reflects the persistent idea of the body as a vessel. This piggybank, with a tattooed surface of iconic symbols, further illustrates what we value and what it means to be human. 

Through a range of artworks and cultural references, Hog Wild argues that pigs occupy a uniquely contradictory position in contemporary life, functioning as mirrors through which we examine human identity, desire, violence, consumption, and the unstable boundary between ourselves and animals. Across the selected works, these themes are repeatedly recontextualized and expanded, drawing viewers into the same cycles of fascination and consumption that the exhibition critiques. In Victoria, where wild hogs are ordinary and often overlooked, and where consumerism plays a significant role in shaping identity, this exhibition has particular teeth. In the show’s accumulation of images and ideas, a certain excess emerges. This overaccumulated state, often associated with filth, is lightly dusted throughout with a babypink cuteness. The result invites viewers to question what they notice, what they dismiss, and ultimately, what they value.

–Jenny Reed, Curator