In the summer of 1900 Buffalo Bill’s Wild West rolled through New Haven, Columbus, and Kalamazoo, along with more than a hundred other US cities. A singular outdoor entertainment extravaganza—part circus, part “historical” reenactment—the show included a mock buffalo hunt, Annie Oakley’s sharpshooting, and a staged Indian raid on a settler cabin in which Buffalo Bill (né William F. Cody) rode into the arena to save the day. Accompanying the spectacle, according to a program from that year, was a full band and a sideshow that included an “American midget,” a “Chinese dwarf,” and a three-legged horse.
Buffalo Bill’s Wild West was an over-the-top celebration of westward expansion that saluted other forms of expansion as well. In 1898 the US had seized Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines in the Spanish-American War (and two years later was still embroiled in a bloody war to control the Philippines). Among the various acts included in the Wild West show of 1900, therefore, was a “Grand Review” honoring the “Rough Riders of the World” that featured a contingent of eight Filipino cowboys. What exactly those eight Filipinos did in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West was only sparsely documented. In his voluminous 2005 book about the show, Buffalo Bill’s America, the historian Louis S. Warren noted that they were advertised as part of a presentation of “Strange People from Our New Possessions,” among whom were also Hawaiians and Guamanians.1
Though sidelined by cultural memory, the Filipinos are the main attraction in We Are Coming, an ongoing work of art by Yumi Janairo Roth and Emmanuel David. Since 2022 the Colorado-based artists have resuscitated the performers’ individual names by placing them on theater marquees in towns where Buffalo Bill once staged his shows and then photographing the marquees. All eight have now had their names in lights, including Ysidora Alcantara, Geronimo Ynosincio, and the theatrically named Filimon Ermoso (whose surname translates to “beautiful” in Tagalog and Spanish). Alongside the names, David and Roth add the phrase “We Are Coming,” a nod to the famous broadside that preceded Buffalo Bill’s arrival and featured the phrase “I Am Coming” below an image of Cody and a buffalo stampede.
Roth and David’s photographs are simple: say, a straight-on view of a theater’s illuminated façade at dusk. But in a gallery space, the images are presented with marquee-style signs that portend grand spectacle. We Are Coming teases out a fascinating, little-known episode connected to Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, a show that has been otherwise relentlessly chronicled. But the project is most intriguing for the way it calls into question who gets to don the mantle of Americana. Cowboys are all-American; they are also Filipino.
We Are Coming is at the heart of an exhibition titled “Cowboy” that was on display at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver last winter and is now on view at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth. Curated by Nora Burnett Abrams and Miranda Lash of the MCA Denver, the show gathers almost six dozen works by more than two dozen contemporary artists examining the myth and reality of the cowboy. Their timing couldn’t be better.
The cowboy is an archetype to which US culture perpetually returns—and currently cowboys seem to be everywhere. They are in film (Pedro Almodóvar’s Strange Way of Life, released last year, features Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal as a pair of estranged cowboy lovers), on runways (Pharrell Williams’s January menswear collection for Louis Vuitton was big on big buckles and chaps), in ballet (a recent remake of Marius Petipa’s La Bayadère at Indiana University was staged with cowboys), and most visibly in pop music, where Beyoncé’s meteoric album Cowboy Carter, the cover of which features the singer bearing an American flag on a galloping white steed, got the TikTok set line dancing in ten-gallon hats (not to mention holding forth on the Black roots of country music).
Denver, where I saw “Cowboy,” has an intimate relationship with this subject. One of the principal cattle trails ran east of town in the 1860s and 1870s, making the city an important hub for cowboys and beef barons. In 1917 Buffalo Bill, whose show helped shape public perceptions of cowboyhood, died in Denver, and it was a momentous event: his funeral cortege was followed by seventy cowboys, and his body laid in state at the Colorado State Capitol. Within view of that very Capitol building today stands a century-old bronze by Alexander Phimister Proctor of a cowboy riding a bucking bronco. And the bronco, of course, is the mascot of the city’s football team.
Trying to kill the myth of the cowboy, wrote Larry McMurtry in these pages twenty-five years ago, is “like trying to kill a snapping turtle: no matter what you do to it, the beast retains a sluggish life.”2 “Cowboy” doesn’t attempt to kill the myth, but it does aim to present a more complete picture of who the cowboy is, in reality and in the public imagination.
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The curators began by tackling the conventional wisdom. Greeting visitors in the first gallery was a 1989 image from Richard Prince’s “Cowboy” series that shows a cowboy on a mottled Appaloosa galloping across a sandy expanse—part of the artist’s 1980s-era appropriations of Marlboro ads (many of which, to bring things full circle, were shot by a Colorado photographer named Norm Clasen). Prince’s series questions the romantic profile of the cowboy as constructed by mass media: square-jawed, rugged, macho, casually at home in sublime, high-country terrains. “He is always a HE,” writes Abrams of the cowboy ideal. “He is almost exclusively white and heterosexual; and he is unafraid, undaunted, and independent.”
Having acknowledged the cliché, the curators proceeded to dismantle it. In one gallery a pair of monumental photorealistic drawings by Karl Haendel showed female riders in the throes of rodeo competitions. Nearby, Wildcat, a dreamy multichannel video by the filmmaker Kahlil Joseph, a master at capturing the minor choreographies of quotidian life, records, with languid ease, the rituals of a long-running Black rodeo in Grayson, Oklahoma. In another room a multimedia installation by rafa esparza, featuring contributions by the photographer Fabian Guerrero, brought queer norteño culture into view. The gallery was carpeted with adobe (esparza’s signature material), and on walls and on stands the cowboys of the US–Mexico borderlands danced, embraced, and posed in photographs and videos. Particularly captivating was a larger-than-life painting by esparza (also on adobe) showing two Mexican men in cowboy hats kissing on a crowded nightclub floor. One is lost in the moment, and the other lifts his gaze toward the viewer, aware that his intimacies are being recorded.
This painting shared space with an installation by Nathan Young, an enrolled member of the Delaware Tribe of Indians, who presented artifacts from his community in Oklahoma that document traditions of Indigenous horsemanship—in this case, that of Pawnee riders. (The artist has Pawnee and Kiowa ancestors.) Activation/Transformation II featured a saddle and a vintage poster for an Indian rodeo that included a graphic of a Plains feather headdress alongside images of men on bucking broncos. Young considers the historical and spiritual significance of these artifacts in his arrangements, and it’s too bad the museum didn’t afford him more space and some dramatic lighting to create an installation that felt more immersive. (It consisted mostly of vitrines against a wall.) But some of the objects nonetheless emitted a certain charge. I was taken by a pair of blue-and-black cowboy boots bearing the seal of the Pawnee Nation that shows a wolf in profile, along with a tomahawk and a peace pipe. The boots’ scalloped edges were trimmed with a thin band of red leather, the pull straps studded with silver conchas. It was stylish cowboy flamboyance rooted in Indigenous aesthetics.
“Cowboy” is racially and ethnically diverse because cowboys are—and have always been—diverse. The figure of the modern cowboy emerged from the long drives that began in the 1860s, when cattle ranchers in Texas began moving enormous herds over great distances to get them to rising railroad towns in Colorado, Kansas, and Missouri. The cowboys who managed these grueling transfers were a mix of white southerners (including former Confederate cavalrymen), European immigrants, Mexicans, and Indigenous and Black men. In his groundbreaking 1987 study The Black West, the historian William Loren Katz estimated that some five thousand Black cowboys drove cattle on the Chisholm Trail alone, leading hundreds of miles from South Texas to Abilene, Kansas.
And that’s just one piece of a much larger history. The historian Michael Grauer, who serves as a curator at the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, has traced some of the many influences that gave rise to the modern cowboy in exhibitions such as “Caballeros y Vaqueros: The Origin of Western Horse Cultures,” which was on display there in 2019–2020. The American cowboy didn’t spring from the plains fully formed. He is a singular fusion of riding styles borrowed from the Muslim riders of the Iberian peninsula, roping techniques drawn from the Fulani of West Africa (many of whom were enslaved in the US), and items of clothing favored by Mexican vaqueros—such as the ubiquitous chaps (a word derived from the Spanish chaparreras). Moreover, the earliest cowboys on the American continent—the vaqueros who herded cattle in the early days of the Spanish empire—would have likely been mestizo or Indigenous. “The gist of this,” as Grauer put it in a 2021 lecture, “is that the very first cowboys were Indians.”
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The binary of “cowboys and Indians” is therefore false. Nathan Young’s installation of Native cowboy accoutrements certainly scrapped the notion—as did a mixed-media installation by Gregg Deal, a member of the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe, titled Teepugoobakwaetu Modu (Animals That Roam on the Earth). It featured a feathered hat and an overcoat trimmed with beads and lined with fabric that bore the visage of John Wayne. The garment was suspended over a display that featured replica guns, an abalone shell, and tins of Spam—arranged as if they might be sacred objects on an altar. Deal donned the clothing for a performance at the museum, in which he silently patrolled the galleries like a specter. The details of the coat were darkly humorous—embroidered onto Wayne’s face was a set of vampire fangs—and the work stood as a firm rejection of the heroism of the cowboy, an idea that frequently puts Indigenous people in the role of the villain.
“Cowboy” struck at the myths, but it toyed with them, too. Displayed next to Andy Warhol’s 1965 film Horse—in which a group of Factory stars stage some very loose western-style action around a live horse that the artist somehow got into his studio—was a series of fantastic drawings by Matthew J. Mahoney depicting the death of John Joel Glanton, a nineteenth-century outlaw who appears in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (1985). A dozen of these imagine Glanton’s death in the balletic style of a cinematic storyboard: the lone figure of a cowboy against a plain white background bucking and bending and writhing and twisting, bullets exploding parts of his body. The drawings wink at the clichés of Hollywood filmmaking and western painting. They also made me wish the show had included the work of the Southern California painter Raul Guerrero, whose wry canvases skewer western mythmaking with a hypersaturated palette he calls “Looney Tunes.”
Thankfully there was humor (not to mention sex) to be found elsewhere. The cowboy is a figure loaded with an excess of virility. Owen Wister’s 1902 novel The Virginian—the best-selling book about a cowboy in the wilds of Wyoming that helped codify the cowboy as heroic, white, and male—was drenched in not-so-subtle eroticism. The unnamed title character is “a slim young giant, more beautiful than pictures,” decked out in a broad hat with a “cartridge-belt that slanted across his hips.” Though covered in dust, “the weather-beaten bloom of his face shone through it duskily, as the ripe peaches look upon their trees in a dry season.”
At the show in Denver, the Mexico City–based artist Ana Segovia seized on the seductive hypermasculinity of the cowboy in a pair of paintings, one of which—Regaining Lost Confidence (2019)—renders a close-up of what appears to be a man’s crotch in bright acid colors (part of a terrific series on this subject). Also saturated with eroticism was Rodeo Queen, a 1972 sculpture by the late Luis Jiménez, who was born in El Paso. The artist was known for fabricating fiberglass sculptures that married the aesthetics of car culture with the iconography of the West and Chicano rasquachismo (which celebrates humble materials).3 His Vaquero, a Mexican cowboy on a bucking bronco, welcomes visitors to the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. In Denver he is famous for Mustang, the monumental blue horse with demonic red eyes that rears up before Denver International Airport (and is affectionately known as “Blucifer”). Rodeo Queen shows a voluptuous female rider on a rocking horse, her face bearing a look of concentrated ecstasy. It is a parody of cowboy culture that serves as a celebration too.
“Cowboy” is by no means a comprehensive show, but it is a meaningful one. Endless exhibitions have been devoted to realist cowboy painting. And there have been shows on Black cowboys, Mexican vaqueros, and female cowboys. Moreover, art exhibitions have looked critically at how the West is portrayed in art—most recently “Many Wests: Artists Shape an American Idea,” at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. But the focus of “Cowboy”—on the ways artists have responded to the figure of the cowboy in contemporary art—is unique, and all the more so for its attention to race, ethnicity, nationality, and gender. Not everything hits. A number of monochromatic shadowgrams made by Lucy Raven at the site of the atomic bomb tests in New Mexico feel like they were parachuted in from another show. But overall the exhibition offers a striking snapshot of the cowboy at this moment, when our understanding of this archetypal figure is expanding and shifting.
The exhibition was made doubly meaningful by its proximity to the Denver Art Museum, which sits on the opposite side of the city’s downtown and is home to an important collection of art from the western US that includes well-known cowboy bronzes by Proctor, Charles Marion Russell, and Frederic Remington, as well as paintings by Thomas Eakins. The presence of the Philadelphia realist in a collection of western art may seem unlikely. But Eakins spent time in the Dakota Territory in the 1880s, where he painted and photographed…cowboys.
The Denver Art Museum’s installation addresses history’s erasures and elisions. The opening gallery features a series of resplendent western landscapes, as well as a bronze of an Indigenous warrior on horseback. A digital map on one wall marks the shrinking over time of the western territories accorded to Natives. The whole installation makes the point that the West of old was not simply empty land for the taking. (Denver and its environs occupy the traditional lands of the Arapaho, Ute, and Cheyenne.) But even this kind of presentation can’t suppress the cowboy myth. To walk through the western art galleries is to watch the legend of the strapping white cowboy come to life. There is Eakins’s gentle painting, Cowboy Singing, created around 1892. Nearby are canvases of cowboys riding the open range by William Herbert Dunton and E. William Gollings, from 1914 and 1921, respectively—artistic precursors to the taciturn Marlboro Man. (Many of these paintings do not feature cattle, by the way—the animal that presumably makes a cowboy a cowboy. As McMurtry once wrote, “Cows are hard to poeticize.”)
The mixed roots of the cowboy do make an appearance in the Denver Art Museum, in a remarkable canvas by the British painter James Walker, from around 1877, that shows Mexican cowboys roping a bear. They are decked out in cropped vaquero jackets, flat-brimmed sombreros, and chaps bearing silver botonadura (buttons) along the seams. (The curators at the MCA Denver reproduced Walker’s painting in their catalog as a way of nodding to the cowboy’s extensive Mexican roots.) But most intriguing is a gallery devoted to the ways that the cowboy has been dramatized in dime novels, illustrations, and movies. It features early film clips, a vitrine containing a first edition of Wister’s The Virginian, and a cartoonish painting of a gunfight by the popular illustrator N.C. Wyeth. Violence is central to the cowboy myth—though that violence, like so much else, has been exaggerated. As Christopher Knowlton writes in his clear-eyed 2017 book, Cattle Kingdom: The Hidden History of the Cowboy West, “disease was a far greater scourge—the threat most likely to cut short a cowboy’s life.”
The history of these works receives additional scrutiny in an informative (and blessedly well-written) catalog, The American West in Art: Selections from the Denver Art Museum (2020). An essay by the historian Molly Medakovich, for example, looks at how the “Golden Age of Illustration”—the period from the 1880s to the 1930s when cheap printed forms of mass media became readily available—helped shape the image of the cowboy we know today, even though, at that point, actual cowboys were in decline. (The increasing privatization of land and the invention of barbed wire had diminished the profession by the 1880s.) “The artistic response to this public thirst for western stories continues to fuel a certain romance about the American West,” writes Medakovich, “one perhaps rooted in fact but now part of an enduring legacy of written, artistic, and cinematic fictions.”
As I walked through the galleries of the Denver Art Museum, I was struck by the exaggerated theatricality of the cowboy: the sublime landscapes, the sense of motion, the ecstatic poses of the bronco busters in bronzes by Proctor, Remington, and Russell—the Berninis of Manifest Destiny. I was also struck by the meanings that we’ve attached to the cowboy over time. The novelist Wallace Stegner wrote in The American West as Living Space (1987) that the reality of the cowboy was one of
an overworked, underpaid hireling, almost as homeless and dispossessed as a modern crop worker, and his fabled independence was and is chiefly the privilege of quitting his job in order to go looking for another just as bad.
Yet we project autonomy, grit, and sex appeal onto the figure. They are roguish loners and fearless leaders. As Abrams writes in the catalog for “Cowboy”:
To conceptualize the cowboy as one who could tame and bend an animal to his will is to metaphorically connect with a figure who is larger than life, and who can wrestle (literally) the broader, existential threats of the surrounding environment.
Cowboys are the all-American folk saints who connect us to the divine.
If the western art collection at the Denver Art Museum shows the birth of the cowboy myth, the MCA Denver’s “Cowboy” brought that myth—along with all the theatricality—into the present, expanding the meanings and iconography we attach to this complex figure. In one of the first galleries, Jiménez’s Latina rodeo queen stood within view of a painting by Amy Sherald that showed a young Black man in a cowboy hat confidently decked out in a shirt with a US flag, his jeans cinched by a large belt buckle. Across the room hung a magnificent, larger-than-life painting, Rodeo Boys (2022), by the Ghana-born artist Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe, who came to know the cowboy as a child in Accra, watching old spaghetti westerns on TV. His canvas shows two Black cowboys concentrating on the action at a rodeo. The men wear ornately decorated chaps (harkening to the garment’s Mexican origins), and their leather vests are studded with patches that read “Cowboy World” and “Follow Your Arrow.” Some of these insignias the artist has rendered in paint; others are real patches adhered to the surface of the canvas. Like the cowboy, it’s a seamless blend of fact and fiction.
Quaicoe’s painting was drawn from a photograph by Ivan McClellan of two young bull riders at an event in Rosenberg, Texas. McClellan is an Oregon-based photojournalist who has spent years photographing Black rodeos and Black cowboy culture in Oklahoma, Arkansas, California, and Colorado, among other locales. The image of the bull riders appears in his recent collection, Eight Seconds: Black Rodeo Culture, which, like so many documentary projects about cowboys, features no shortage of pictures of men and women looking heroic on their horses. But what makes it worth examining is the range of Black cowboy experiences that McClellan has managed to record. On one page, Stona Mane of LA’s Compton Cowboys puffs on a blunt before his black steed; on another, two bull riders in Texas pray quietly before entering the ring.
What is especially captivating are the stylistic fusions. In Eight Seconds cowboys wear locs, gold chains, and grills. A rodeo clown performs in a 1970s-style pimp costume. A Black woman in a sparkling shirt rides through an arena bearing the African American flag (the red, black, and green standard devised in 1990 by the artist David Hammons). In these images, Black urban and artistic vernaculars mix easily with existing cowboy aesthetics. And that is ultimately what the cowboy is all about. There is no one way to embody him; the cowboy is the ultimate synthesis, a figure in a state of perpetual evolution, a repository for our grandest aspirations and our basest truths.
