rafa esparza and Fabian Guerrero, “Querías Norte,” 2023, mixed media
In 2009, when I wrote a magazine article about the late great Fort Worth performance artist Amon Carter, I interviewed his daughter, Ruth Carter Stevenson, by telephone. She was warm, witty, and a lot of fun. But when the piece appeared, she called me back, madder than a wet hornet. Primarily, she was unhappy that I had quoted from Jerry Flemmons’ biography of her dad, Amon Carter – The Texan Who Played Cowboy for America.
“My father never played cowboy a day in his life,” Ms. Stevenson reprimanded. I resisted pointing out the considerable photographic evidence to the contrary, rebutting instead that I myself have ‘played cowboy’ both personally and professionally, and that such affectation is a worthy and honorable pastime. Alas, she was unswayed.
Years later, at an Amon Carter Museum of American Art press luncheon for an exhibition of photography along the U.S. / Mexico border, a museum associate confided that the politically charged show would never have been staged there had Ms. Stevenson still been living. And, while it has received a somewhat rocky reception nonetheless, one would have to assume the same for the museum’s current exhibition, COWBOY.
rafa esparza and Fabian Guerrero, “Querías Norte,” 2023, mixed media
The show is something of an oddball grab-bag, and I do not mean that negatively. Originally organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, it’s an assortment of variably disparate elements that, among other things, aims to illustrate that cowboy iconography — in both real deal and dime store iterations — is deeply embedded in niches and swaths of American culture that range far beyond the dominant white-male symbolism of John Wayne and the Marlboro Man. Film and video, photography, paintings, drawings, installations, sculpture, ceramics, sound, performance, historical artifacts, and conceptual projects by some 29 artists take aim at the prevailing mythology to reveal that there are indeed Black cowboys, Native American cowboys, gay cowboys, space cowboys, etc. etc. It seems a little bizarre, here in the big, fat sophisticated 2020s, that this news would be a surprise to people, but there ya go.
Luis Jiménez, “Rodeo Queen,” 1972, fiberglass and nylon “hair”
Greeting visitors at the entrance to Cowboy is Luis Jiménez’ sculpture Rodeo Queen. Cast in the artist’s signature brightly colored fiberglass, the piece, despite the cool gloss of the material, still manages to convey the heat of the sweaty Southwest as the tougher-than-leather cowgirl leans back in the saddle for an eternal eight seconds. Underscoring the exhibition’s “play” factor, the rodeo queen’s bucking bronco is mounted on a hobbyhorse rocker.
Nearby hangs one of Richard Prince’s seemingly interminable Marlboro Man advertising appropriations. He re-photographs the stirring magazine images of rugged individuals in boots and Stetsons flying in the saddle through some frozen-in-time, imagined Western scene. Sprinkle a little pixie dust, add a major brand name, and bingo! — big deal, big time art. Even more annoying, though, for the few minutes or so that I looked at the image, I kind of enjoyed it.*
Andy Warhol, “Horse,” 1965, excerpt of digital copy of 16mm film
A small screen plays a ten-minute excerpt loop from Andy Warhol’s 1965 film, Horse. Andy’s cowboys pose, priss, and preen for the camera in butt-tugging denim while the poor horse rented for the Factory shoot stands waiting for the ordeal to end. The Andy boys are playing cowboy, but yeah, okay.
Mel Chin, “Rough Rider,” 2002, barbed wire and steel
Mel Chin, “Rough Rider,” detail, 2002, barbed wire and steel
Mel Chin, “Rough Rider,” 2002, barbed wire and steel
Mel Chin’s saddle made from barbed wire is simply freaking brilliant to behold.
Ken Taylor Reynaga, “El Valle at Dusk,” 2020
I decided long ago that I would never live anywhere that you can’t walk down the street and see a fair number of people wearing cowboy hats. Because, to me, the hats look like little bitty UFOs that have beamed in from distant galaxies and strategically landed on Western skulls. They surely must contain some important message for the human race. Ken Taylor Reynaga’s painting, El Valle at Dusk, in which three airborne cowboy hats hover above a valley floor, seems to confirm that theory. His four ceramic sombreros spark warm — and often, imaginary — recollections of retail turista outposts in Mexican border towns.
Matthew J. Mahoney, “Untitled,” 2013, from the series, “In the Wake of John Joel Glanton,” ink on paper
Though they quickly transcend the association, Matthew J. Mahoney’s series of ink on paper works, In the Wake of John Joel Glanton, might bring to mind those incessant, over-the-top enactments of one’s own demise in backyard shootouts while playing cowboy. According to one source, the series included 100 versions of Glanton’s dramatic death (or of the deaths of Glanton’s many victims — the variety of hats worn might indicate that the works do not all depict Glanton). In another report, the number swelled to 1,000 renderings of the killings. A real person, described on a history page as “a soldier of fortune, outlaw, and notorious bounty-hunter and murderer,” Glanton (1819 – 1850) appears as a character in Cormac McCarthy’s 1985 novel, Blood Meridian. In 1850, Glanton was in Mexico, bounty-hunting for Apache scalps in an arrangement with the Chihuahua Legislature. When Glanton and his gang could not find Apaches, they killed and scalped both Mexicans and peaceful Indians, some of whom exacted revenge by slitting Glanton’s throat as he slept. “His body was taken to the U.S. side of the Colorado River, lashed to a dog and burned with the animal.” (He must have had some good qualities, however, as it’s said he married “the most beautiful woman in the Republic of Texas,” Joaquina Menchaca, daughter of the widely respected former mayor of San Antonio.)
Kenneth Tam, “Silent Spikes,” 2021, two channel video with sound
Kenneth Tam, “Silent Spikes,” 2021, two channel video with sound
Kenneth Tam, “Silent Spikes,” 2021, two channel video with sound
Kenneth Tam, “Silent Spikes,” 2021, two channel video with sound
A number of works in the exhibition operate in or close to what catalog contributor Jongwoo Jeremy Kim, writing about Kenneth Tam‘s video work Silent Spikes, refers to as “the blissful, camp eternity of the Wild West.” Referencing the thousands of Chinese workers who helped build the Transcontinental Railroad, without being considered complete human beings by the American government and much of its population, Tam’s piece explores Asian Americans’ perception and embodiment of masculinity and racial identity, as partly filtered through a complex drama of Western gesture and style. Standing in mostly empty zones of pastel light, the Asian male performers pantomime rodeo riding, pose semi-unanswerable questions, and interact in a manner suggesting that they are attempting to learn how to do so in a new and foreign world.
Ana Segovia, “Aunque Me Espine La Mano,” 2018, video
Ana Segovia, “Aunque Me Espine La Mano,” 2018, video
Influenced by the 1940s and ’50s Golden Age of Mexican cinema, Ana Segovia‘s short video, AUNQUE ME ESPINE LA MANO, depicts the choreography of a mating ritual of sorts in which two figures of unspecified gender negotiate their physicality, dressed in ornate charro suits of sugary neon colors. Segovia’s series of paintings, YOU LIKE IT HOW I LIKE IT, focuses on cowboys’ belt buckles and lower mid-sections, rendered in a homey, comfortable-pair-of-old-jeans kind of style that disarms much potential awkwardness.
Kahlil Joseph, “Wildcat (Aunt Janet),” detail, 2016, three channel video
The internet hosts an earlier, single-channel version of Khalil Joseph’s short, camp-free film Wildcat, a dreamy, poetic meditation on the Black rodeo in Grayson, Oklahoma. But the three-channel Cowboy version, shown on a hanging triangle of screens, enhances the work’s atmospherics. The flickering imagery of the rodeo and its small African American town often flows through the diaphanous cloth screens and overlays or merges with the imagery on the other screens. With Flying Lotus’ ethereal music as its soundtrack, the effect is mesmerizing. “Black people are light years more advanced than the ideas and images that circulate would have you believe,” Joseph told nowness.com. “The spaces we control and exist in are my ground zero for filming, at least so far, and there are opportunities for me to tap into the energy. So an all-black town with an all-black rodeo in the American heartland was a kind of vortex or portal through which I could actually show this.”
Otis Kwame Quaicoe, “Rodeo Boys,” 2022, oil and fabric applique on canvas
Portland-based painter Otis Kwame Quaicoe loved watching Westerns while growing up in Ghana. “I was intrigued by how cowboys dressed and how they talk, the boots and all that,” he told artnet.com in 2022. “It wasn’t something I was thinking deeply about — I liked the way they’d sling a gun. It was just fun to watch…” That fun turned into a serious interest in 2019 when he saw a group of Black men and women called the Compton Cowboys riding horses during a Black Lives Matter protest march. An intensive study of Black American cowboys and cowgirls inspired Quaicoe’s series of rodeo portraits. Duded up in rodeo splendor, his cowboys have a timeless appeal that brings to mind a rock star version of the many, largely unheralded, Black cowhands who went up the trail on cattle drives in the 19th century.
Though the image is likely staged, Deana Lawson’s lone photograph in Cowboy heightens the reality that so intrigues Quaicoe. Her riders appear to have emerged in an instant from the deepest and blackest of nights behind them, as blazing photographic lighting startles their mounts.
Yumi Janairo Roth and Emmanuel David, “We Are Coming,” 2023, mixed media
The rainbow demographics of Cowboy include the collaborative investigations of Filipino American artists Yumi Janairo Roth and Emmanuel David into the (apparently) mostly lost-to-history stories of Filipino performers in the theatrical spectacles staged by Buffalo Bill and other Wild West impresarios. Unable to locate much data on the Filipino artists’ participation in the colossal body of published accounts of the shows, Roth and David have staged cunning episodes in which they trolled Buffalo Bill in such resonant venues as the Cody Theatre in Cody, Wyoming. There, the artists’ marquee texts announced, “We Are Coming” (A famed Buffalo Bill advance ad proclaimed, “I Am Coming”), and cited as headliners the names of Filipino Wild West performers Ysidora Alcantara, Felix Alcantara, Geronimo Ynosincio, and others. “Filipinos figured prominently in the imaginaries of the American West,” David told Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine.” However, they were often portrayed in negative and stereotypical ways. Through our research, we have attempted to give the Filipinos more dimension and to understand their full lives. The first step is to name them, and the project attempts to name them… So much of history is told from the perspective of the dominant groups, and our project looks to decenter those conventional narratives.”
Ronnie Goodeagle’s saddle. This piece and other Goodeagle artifacts are credited to Nathan Young of Tahlequah, Oklahoma, but it is unclear if that means the artist by that name or one of his family members with the name. Attempts to reach the artist were unsuccessful.
T shirt, Ron Goodeagle Memorial Bull Explosion
Poster, 1st Annual Ronnie Goodeagle Memorial Bull Explosion, Pawnee, Oklahoma, 2010 with Ronnie Goodeagle’s cowboy hats
Decentering the conventional rodeo narrative in the Carter’s Cowboy, several artifacts recall the rodeo career of Oklahoman Ronnie Goodeagle, though they are not included in the exhibition’s elegant catalog. Goodeagle’s well-worn saddle and saddle blanket, cowboy hats, 40th Annual Indian National Finals Rodeo Championship Vest (1985), and a poster for the Ronnie Goodeagle Memorial Bull Explosion all attest that when Indian cowboys take a seat on a hurricane deck of some rodeo bull or bronc, they ain’t playin’.
Cowboy is on view at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art through March 23.
*I would probably find Prince’s Marlboro Man works more interesting if the artist had bothered to track down some of the individuals who portrayed the cowboy smoker in tobacco company print and TV ad campaigns and collect some of their perspectives. I spoke with one about 20 years ago for a report on the Nat’s Hats, a collection of well-worn cowboy hats at the Museum of North Texas History in Wichita Falls. Before I interviewed the former Marlboro Man, who had had a career as a hat shaper at The Cow Lot, the Western wear store that donated Nat’s Hats, several people warned me not to bring up the Marlboro Man because the former cowboy model would “talk your leg off” about it. So, of course, I had to bring it up. The man spoke of his moment in the limelight with tender reverence, as if he had been crowned King of the American West. It was…strangely compelling. And I still have my legs.
