The crumbs of an earthy, cracked adobe floor, mixed in dirt, hay and some horse dung, are sprinkled throughout the upper room of MCA Denver's latest exhibition. This is the same adobe floor where artist rafa esparza and his longtime collaborator Fabian Guerrero took a moment to dance on while the earth was still wet.
In the aftermath of their baile, one can now walk on the intimate indents of frozen earth in what is meant to be a representation of love in Norteño culture. The same black boots used in this dance are left as witness.
"We got all the materials, put it in a freezer truck outside the museum for a week to kill all the bugs, and then we had a whole team mix it in the fire lane kind of like the way you see folks crushing grapes," said senior curator Miranda Lash. "It took about a week to mix it, spread it, do the dance while it was still wet and wait for it to dry."
On display through Feb. 18, 2024, esparza's piece is part of MCA Denver's latest exhibition Cowboy, drawing from the works of 27 artists meant to challenge the mainstream notion that America's great horse riding heroes were all white, cisgender men.
Ken Taylor Reynaga's sculptural cowboy hats, often connected to depictions of the female anatomy, not only help to feminize the most masculine of stereotypes but also adds to their role in the culture.
"We love [Reynaga's] descriptions of why he focuses on hats," Lash said. "For the folks working fields they are ubiquitous because they protect you from the sun. They are functional objects."
An image of plastic wrapped cowboy hats hanging in the aisles of a Bennett, Colorado grocery store, blocking bottles of hot sauce and boxes of Premium saltine crackers, is displayed on the exhibition's lower level.
The black and white image, captured by Denver-based photographer Juan Fuentes, was taken during an almost seven-month long project studying and connecting with the people of a small rural town 40 miles east of Denver.
Fuentes hosted workshops at a local library where he invited locals interested in photographing Bennett through their own eyes. This culminated in an outdoor installation of disposable camera flicks, developed with the help of Fuentes. The photographer, known for his urban eye, says the whole experience reminded him of childhood trips to his hometown of Chihuahua, Mexico.
"I didn't take my first photo until the fifth visit I had in Bennett," Fuentes said. "I really wanted to make these connections first and build some relationships."
The project, commissioned by the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art and Anythink Libraries as an effort to activate art in library spaces, caught the attention of Lash during a studio visit with Fuentes. They spoke about what it would look like to adapt some of these images into Cowboy.
"It is really important to us that there be a strong representation of Colorado artists in the show," Lash said.
"I just wanted to reflect some of that Mexican vaquero and charro culture that's been here for generations," Fuentes added. "While it feels like something from the past, talking about the mythology of the cowboy, it's amazing to see how alive it is and how fresh certain aspects of it are."
Artists like Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe and Ana Segovia imagine a new world of cowboys through their works.
Quaicoe, a Ghanaian artist who became obsessed with cowboy culture before living in the U.S., depicts friends and family as cowboys in his paintings as a way of assuming the cowboy identity.
Segovia's work focuses on the golden age of Mexican cinema celebrating the traditionally macho Charro culture. Her film, titled "Aunque me espine la mano," depicts queer Charros in neon suits and borrows gestures from a classic Charro film.
"She talked about how she went to multiple tailors, all of whom declined to make a charro suit in these [neon] colors," Lash said. "She ultimately collaborated with an artist on making the suits."
Belt buckles, photographs and T-shirts of Indian and Pawnee Rodeos are also on display by the family of Nathan Young, an artist and scholar from Tahlequah, Oklahoma.
"We approached him about the Cowboy exhibition and he got really excited for this to be an opportunity to share his own family's history," Lash said. "Showing the longstanding history of his family within rodeo culture."
The exhibition takes "apart the myth of a homogenized idea," like the American cowboy, by drawing on the perspectives of Asian American, Black, Latinx and Native artists, Lash added.
"The cowboy, one of the reasons we really focused on it is that yes, it's in popular culture...But it's also a political idea that's tied to American identity. The rugged individual who can set his own terms and succeed in the way he wants. The Maverick," Lash said. "We were really trying to dig into why so many politicians, entrepreneurs like identifying with the cowboy. Art can really pull apart and deconstruct the holes in that narrative."
