Now at MCA Denver: Cowboys like you’ve never seen them before

In the large-scale artwork “Set Ups,” Stephanie Syjuco contrasts an intricate, menacing print with a verdant landscape and faded imagery of the American West.

“The green backdrop and screen is a nod toward that cinematic construction of cowboys,” said Syjuco, who was born in the Philippines and raised in the U.S., where she internalized decades of cowboy imagery in movies and TV shows. “When MCA Denver approved it I was like, ‘yes!’ It’s very specific to this region and the mythology of the cowboy, and it’s related to work I was already doing on landscape panting and how it’s come to influence narratives of westward progress.”

Syjuco’s is one of dozens of pieces selected by Museum of Contemporary Art Denver curators for its new “Cowboy” exhibition. Works that invoke German American painter Albert Bierstadt’s epic landscapes sit next to visual interrogations of Manifest Destiny, asking us to reconsider assumptions about the Old West.

Running Sept. 29 through Feb. 18, 2024,  “Cowboy” is MCA’s first large-scale survey of “one of the most fraught and persistent figures in contemporary American culture,” curators wrote. It dives into that dusty world with 27 artists and 70 artworks sourced from international artists and locals such as Gregg Deal and R. Alan Brooks. In diverse styles and media, they critique, praise, reimagine and explode the notion that cowboys were all white men supernaturally connected to the land.

Some cowboys were that way, of course. But viewers would be forgiven for feeling that some of the MCA works grate against their expectations. And that’s the point, underlining the fact that cowboys were also women, Black and Latino Americans, and Filipino immigrants, among others.

“We had over 800 people at the opening,” said co-curator Miranda Lash, “which I think speaks to how large the cowboy looms in people’s minds. What does it mean to take on an icon that’s not only huge in pop culture but also has so much weighted influence on Indigenous identity?”

The answers are subjective, and MCA Denver’s not the only museum asking them. At Denver Art Museum, “The Russells in Denver, 1921,” is rekindling the spirit of an exhibition the Western art icon Charles Marion Russell staged at the city’s landmark Brown Palace Hotel 122 years ago, The Denver Post’s Ray Rinaldi reported.

Lash has already seen enough positive reception from MCA’s “Cowboy” to start conversations with another, unnamed venue for a potential “Cowboy” traveling exhibition.

” ‘Cowboy’ is very much borne of and embedded within Denver,” said co-curator Nora Burnett Abrams, who’s also MCA Denver’s director. “The idea of the cowboy in New York lands just really differently than in Colorado. … The story of the cowboy allows us to reach back into the past and pull forward certain historical things that have been erased, as well as honor the way cowboy culture is lived out today.”

Admiration for real, working cowboys, cattle ranchers and rodeo riders is palpable among the works. But so are questions about why and how we justify that admiration.

“It’s one of those things that people love, and we’re not even sure why,” said artist Karl Haendel, whose “Rodeo 11” is a stunning, photorealistic pencil drawing of an adolescent girl atop a majestic horse. “There are so many cultural touchstones that can be explored through the cowboy — masculinity and homoeroticism, a lot of the uglier sides of American policy, and white men controlling nature and Indigenous peoples. Frederic Remington is awesome, but it’s all dudes on horses.”

Cowboys exist in all parts of the world, ranging from Brazil and Argentina to Central Asia, where Mongolian and Kazakhstani horse culture predates the conquest of the American West. A large-scale exhibition was practically required, according to curators, to do justice to the subject matter.

“That’s why it had to be a group show,” Lash said. “We wanted to showcase a wide variety of voices, which relieves the pressure of having to make a definitive statement on the subject.”

IF YOU GO

“Cowboy,” at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, through Feb. 2024. 1485 Delgany St, Denver. General admission $9 to $12. 303-298-7554; mcadenver.org.

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