



1 / 9 Chevron Chevron PHOTOGRAPH BY BRAD TRENT Kesha (Mama) Morse, from “The Federation of Black Cowboys” series for the Village Voice, 2016.

In a 2016 portrait by the photographer Brad Trent, an older black woman poses on a bale of hay, a white Stetson hat on her head and a pair of hand-tooled cowboy boots on her feet. The fringe on her leather jacket flows downward, as do her knee-length dreadlocks, which echo the texture of the lasso coiled in her fist. Her posture is at once relaxed and confrontational. Her gaze is steely as a gun.

The woman in the image is Kesha (Mama) Morse, the sixty-seven-year-old president of the New York Federation of Black Cowboys, an organization that is devoted to teaching inner-city kids about a neglected aspect of American history: the thousands of African-Americans who played a role in settling the Old West. According to scholars, one in four cowboys working in Texas during the golden age of westward expansion was black; many others were Mexican, mestizo, or Native American—a far more diverse group than Hollywood stereotypes of the cowboy would suggest. Bass Reeves, a black lawman who had a Native American sidekick, is thought to have served as a model for the Lone Ranger. Britt Johnson, a black cowboy whose wife and children were captured by Comanches, in 1865, partly inspired John Ford’s classic film “The Searchers,” almost a century later. In the wake of the Civil War, the African-American Buffalo Soldiers were dispatched by Congress to protect Western settlers and federal land.

Morse’s portrait, which Trent shot last year for the Village Voice, appears alongside the work of other photographers in a compact but exciting new exhibit, “Black Cowboy,” at the Studio Museum in Harlem. The photos, like the very idea of a black cowboy, suggest that that many common conceptions of what an iconic American looks like are wrong. Amanda Hunt, the curator of “Black Cowboy,” describes the show as a “small-scale revisionist art history.” The exhibit highlights the ways in which black communities today are celebrating and reclaiming their frontier history, and includes shots of black riders engaging in many aspects of the equestrian arts. Among the show’s revelations is the sight of horsemanship flourishing in urban settings. There’s something enthralling about discovering black cowboys in unlikely locales, and the artists seem to take as much delight from unseating stereotypes as their subjects do from sitting in the saddle.

“Legends,” a romantic, rebellious photo by the Oklahoma-born photographer Ron Tarver, captures a lone black rider astride his horse in an overgrown empty lot in North Philadelphia, against the backdrop of a giant Malcolm X mural. Also on display is Mohamed Bourouissa’s loving two-channel video installation “Horse Day,” which follows several young black men from a West Philadelphia neighborhood known locally as “The Bottom” as they prepare to compete at the 2014 Horse Tuning Expo, a showcase of skill for riders and their mounts. We watch as the men trick out their saddles with flashing CDs and plastic flowers, and as riders clop along the city streets, their leisurely pace at odds with the traffic around them.

Other art works move beyond the city streets. “Wildcat,” a haunting slow-motion film by Kahlil Joseph, one of the directors of Beyoncé’s “Lemonade,” chronicles the annual black rodeo in Grayson, Oklahoma. Once called Wildcat, the town was one of several all-black enclaves that thrived during Reconstruction. A poster-size print of Deana Lawson’s photo “Cowboys” depicts two young men, full of swagger, riding horses at night in Georgia. The face of one man is masked with a black bandanna; the other is shirtless and wearing leather chaps, his oversized belt buckle gleaming in the camera’s flash.

The attendant symbols of the cowboy—valor, freedom, dignity—are complicated by Chandra McCormick’s unsettling “Angola Prison Rodeo, Men Breaking Wild Horses,” one of a series of photos that she and her husband, Keith Calhoun, took at the maximum-security Louisiana State Penitentiary, also known as Angola. The image was shot during the prison’s annual rodeo, when inmates are temporarily freed from their cells to tame horses and rope bulls; it shows men, dressed in black-and-white-striped prison uniforms, wrangling broncos in a cloud of brown dust. Angola, built on the site of a former slave-breeding enterprise and cotton plantation, is famous for its racial strife, excessive use of solitary confinement, and policy of sending prisoners to labor en masse in fields; some have compared the harsh conditions there to chattel slavery. McCormick’s image of incarcerated cowboys poses the same challenge that can be found in Mama Morse’s stance: How might it change our national story to envision black bodies—past and present—not as criminals or captives but as dignified, heroic, and free?