Cowboys — and girls — they were everywhere in 2023, from Beyoncé's Renaissance mirrored hat, to a new show about black US Marshal Bass Reeves, to Margot Robbie (above) as Barbie.
Warner County.
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Warner County.
Cowboys — and girls — they were everywhere in 2023, from Beyoncé's Renaissance mirrored hat, to a new show about black US Marshal Bass Reeves, to Margot Robbie (above) as Barbie.
Warner County.
When it came to some of the most urgent and enduring pop culture of 2023, the cowboy took center stage. As far as I could see, hear and experience, the most iconic American characters were being remixed and reimagined, often by a new and defiantly inclusive generation.
There were his mirrorball cowboy hats Renaissance tour, the pastel meadow looks like the Seasons concertgoers and that unforgettable magenta Margot Robbie wore Barbie. Yellowstonea contemporary western starring Kevin Costner, was one of the most-watched shows on TV and its new spin-off 1923 and Lawmen: Bass Reeves lasso to even more audiences. In New York, where I live, it seemed like half of all twenty-somethings spent the summer in cowboy boots, despite the record-breaking heat. I recently took some time off A minute passed to understand the pastoral themes that led the year in culture.
One could argue that even before this forged year, however, the cowboy's appeal as a sad, malleable symbol of Americanness never left us. But something about this year's cowboy kick ran deeper than aesthetics. deeper than a call back to nature beyond our digital lives. 2023 represented a collective and proud reclaiming of the cowboy for those who traditionally felt threatened or excluded by the archetype of the white, patriarchal, fiercely individualistic gunslinger.
David Oyelowo as Bass Reeves.
Lauren Smith/Paramount
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Lauren Smith/Paramount
In the new report, Cowboy, at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver, a collection of works curated by Nora Burnett Abrams explores and demystifies this archetype. Set in Denver, a multiracial and gendered mix of artists reframes the cowboy as a uniquely American blend of traditions that have nothing to do with the Marlboro Man.
We saw this idea in its most mainstream and vivid incarnation in Renaissance tour. Near the end of the show, a beaming Beyoncé climbed atop the glittering disco horse that has come to symbolize this era, dubbed “Reneigh” by fans. Suspended from an intricate pulley system and showered with raining confetti leaves, they floated above a screaming audience decked out in their space cowboy.
For all the futuristic and android references in the Renaissance set design, I thought it was fitting that Beyoncé chose to close her show with an equestrian moment. Reneigh isn't just a reference to that famous photo of Bianca Jagger at Studio 54, it's also a nod to Beyoncé's Texas roots. “I grew up going to the Houston Rodeo every year,” Beyoncé said Harper's Bazaar in 2021. “It was this amazingly diverse and multicultural experience where there was something for every member of the family, including great performances, Houston-style fried Snickers and fried turkey legs.”
As Curator Abrams told me during our conversation about A minute passed, the word “cowboy” has its origins in the enslaved and enslaved black men who tended American cattle, with “boy” a pejorative term applied to black men of all ages. Although the culturally imagined cowboy is often white, in reality, Abrams says, in the mid-1800s, between a third and a quarter of all cowboys were either Black or Mexican.
Centering herself as an intergalactic disco cowboy, Beyoncé, a black Texan, imagines a radical Black future and recalls the truth of the past. The image of the silvery empress of pop evokes the idea of the cowboy as adventurer, but instead of championing westward expansion, she implores us to expand our capacity for pleasure under the throbbing beat of her command music.
The music scenes that inspired Beyoncé Renaissance it's home to queer communities that have been responsible for some of the most inventive and memorable performances of the cowboy this year. Director Pedro Almodóvar premiered his short film Strange way of life at the Cannes Film Festival in May, a Western romance starring Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal as newly resurgent players in the open spectrum.
Pedro Pascal and Ethan Hawke in Pedro Almodóvar's film Strange way of life.
El Deseo/Nico Bustos/Sony Pictures Classics
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El Deseo/Nico Bustos/Sony Pictures Classics
Almodóvar once turned down an offer to direct Brokeback Mountain but he found this perfect moment to queer the gay cowboy canon with his distinctive and rich style. Critics embraced this revival through the film's overt references to Douglas Sirk and Sergio Leone, but its short duration and limited release somewhat dampen its reception. Fortunately the internet's thirst for Pascal, and the desire to reexamine the cowboy from a new vantage point in queer cinema, has ensured the film a prominent place in the conversation.
Another favorite festival this year was National Anthem, photographer Luke Gilford's portrait of the queer rodeo scene. Guilford has long meditated on cowboy figures in his portraiture, but the premiere of his film marks our current moment.
Queer conceptions of the cowboy breathe new life into what is often a staid beacon of traditional masculinity. As New York Times Magazine Author and cultural critic J Wortham explained to me, in this context, the “boy” in “cowboy” is a gender-neutral sentence. They also pointed out that cowboy buttons are full of sexual potential. A lasso doesn't have to be just a lasso, and the steps are sometimes better worn alone. Maybe the cowboy isn't a scary interloper, but your sturdy protector, like Stormé DeLarverie, the patron of West Village gay and lesbian bars for nearly four decades – a black cowboy hat was often part of her look.
On the Denver Stream Cowboy exhibition, one artist grappling with the legacy and future of this image is multidisciplinary artist and composer Nathan Young, a member of the Delaware Indian Tribe and descendant of the Pawnee Nation and the Kiowa Tribe. Young's installation is Activation/Transformationa collection of photographs, boots, hats and other personal items collected from different generations of his family, some of whom were involved in Native American rodeo culture.
Abrams pointed out how Young's work exposes the hypocrisy and inaccuracy of the racist “cowboys vs. Indians” trope.[Activation/Transformation] subverts this silly binary by showing through real materials how “cowboys” [Young’s] His family and community have always been,” Abrams said. How can the stereotypical cowboy be an object of whiteness if so much of his material culture is based on and intertwined with the Native American traditions he wants to annihilate?” It's that worthy question that surrounds Young's installation, and it also surely haunts another of the year's biggest pop culture moments, Martin Scorsese's 1920s epic set on the Osage Nation, Killers of the Flower Moon.
This year proved that despite the enduring power of pop culture icons like John Wayne and Buffalo Bill, the symbol of the cowboy – and the stallions, chumps and lassos that go with it – does not belong in colonial expansion or mainstream narratives of Hollywood. Over the centuries, the cowboy has become an immovable entry into our public domain, free for the most alienated to deconstruct, confront, and claim as America charts a new path for its future. In trying to put words to the project of “assertion[ing] Americanness,” while also accounting for the violence traditionally symbolized by the presence of the cowboy, as critic J Wortham says, “maybe there are other alternative ways of being, and we should try to embrace them to bring them into the present.”
