News

Author and photographer of the book The Long Ride Home: Black Cowboys in America sits down with Tonya Pendleton to discuss the many years he's spent documenting black cowboys in America as well as the challenges that came with getting the book published, particularly from white publishers.

2024, OCT. 3

WURD

Reality Check with Ron Tarver

Tonya Pendleton

Author and photographer of the book The Long Ride Home: Black Cowboys in America sits down with Tonya Pendleton to discuss the many years he's spent documenting black cowboys in America as well as the challenges that came with getting the book published, particularly from white publishers.

2024, SEPT. 26

FOX 29

Hank is horsing around with Ron Tarver

Hank Flynn

Hank goes to Parx Racing to talks with Pulitzer prize winning photographer Ron Tarver about his book “The Long Ride Home” about black cowboys in America.

When Ron Tarver first photographed Jordan Bullock in 1993, he was just a 12-year-old kid growing up in North Philadelphia who was mad for horses, just like his old man, Bumpsey Bullock, who ran the White House stables in Brewerytown.

Jordan is now 43 and has built his life around horses. He’s a racehorse trainer, keeping a half dozen stalls at the stables of Parx Casino and Racetrack in Bensalem.

“This is all I ever knew. It was normal my whole life,” Bullock said. “That’s what we did on weekends and after school, it was my father and my aunt, my cousins, one of my uncles. My mother’s side of the family — by total chance, my parents did not know this when they met each other — but my mother’s side of the family is in horses in Virginia.”

Bullock appears as a child in Tarver’s new book, “The Long Ride Home: Black Cowboys in America,” representing a time in Philadelphia’s urban history when horses were everywhere. Many neighborhoods in North and West Philly had stables.

“You had the White House. You had 33nd Street, at 332nd and Master which is literally up the street from us,” Bullock said. “You had the Hole in the Wall, which was a stable where they literally broke a hole in the wall of a warehouse and built a stable.”

“You have Fletcher Street, which is on Fletcher Street. You have Uber Street, which is actually the Big Muddy. That’s what they call it because the yard was always muddy,” he said. ”You had Goats. Goat was a person and a farm on Ridge Avenue near Andorra, which is now houses. 48th Street is not even on 48th Street. It’s on Parkside Avenue, but that’s just what it’s called. Same thing with Sammy’s. There’s, like, a whole culture.”

Tarver spent years during the 1990s following Philadelphia’s Black cowboys as they cared for horses in their stables, went on rides through Fairmount Park’s 57 miles of trails, and took trips to Manhattan. He also traveled across the country seeking similar Black horse cultures.

“Jordan’s dad was an amazing man,” Tarver said of Bumpsey Bullock “There’s a photo of him that I shot in Harlem. He’s sitting on this horse and on Lenox Avenue and there’s a cop car behind him. He looks like a monument. He was a monumental man.”

Tarver, a former staff photographer for The Philadelphia Inquirer, has been photographing Black cowboys for 30 years. He started at Bullock’s White House stables while on assignment for the newspaper in 1992, which ran as the cover story in what used to be the Inquirer’s Sunday magazine.

“When that story ran I got more email — or I should say mail, this was way before email,” Tarver corrected himself. “I got more snail mail from readers than any story that I’d ever done.”

The success of the photo essay prompted Tarver to ask his editor to send him across the country to take pictures of other Black cowboys scenes. He went to Oklahoma, where Tarver grew up around Black horseman, Texas and California, to rodeos and stables and ranches.

That became a week-long series of photo essays that ran in the Inquirer in 1993, earning Tarver a Pulitzer Prize nomination (he would win the prize almost 20 years later, in 2012, for a team reporting effort on violence in public schools). National Geographic gave him a grant to keep shooting photos of Black cowboys.

Flush with success, Tarver sought out a book deal in the 1990s, knocking on doors of New York City publishing houses.

But nobody was interested.

“In fact, one acquisition editor told me, ‘I don’t think there’s such a thing as Black cowboys,’” Tarver recalled. “I said, ’I got about 20,000 slides says there are.’”

Since then, Black cowboys have entered the mainstream. Rapper Lil Nas X released the smash hit “Old Town Road” in 2018, a hit that played with a Black western aesthetic. Beyoncé also released her “Cowboy Carter” album this year, stepping into the country genre.

Earlier this spring another photography book was released, “Eight Seconds: Black Rodeo Culture,” by Ian McClellen, whose Instagram account eightsecs has attracted more than 27,000 followers with its photos of Black riders.

In 2022, the film “Concrete Cowboy” starring Idris Elba brought the image of Philadelphia’s Black horsemen to the big screen. Filmmaker Jordan Peele (“Get Out,” “Us”), riding on the coattails of his own Black horseman thriller “Nope” (2022), is producing a documentary series about Black cowboys for the Peacock, NBC’s streaming service.

This year, the Bill Pickett Invitational traveling Black rodeo celebrates its 40th anniversary as a nationally touring event. The oldest Black rodeo, the Roy Leblanc Okmulgee Invitational, held its 69th rodeo this summer in its hometown of Okmulgee, Oklahoma.

“I think it is more prevalent now because it’s out in the zeitgeist,” Tarver said. “You can’t have better notoriety than Beyoncé coming out with an album. The ‘Cowboy Carter’ album just blew everything up.”

“It became accepted, but there’s still a little bit of prejudice out there when it comes to what’s accepted as country and what’s not accepted,” he said. “I’m hoping that this book will just add to the conversation.”

“The Long Ride Home” sticks to Tarver’s early photography from the 1990s, showing Philadelphia’s urban horseman playing basketball in a dirt lot while their horse watches; a young boy in Texas wearing full western gear – with a belt buckle nearly the size of his head – doing rope tricks; and two women in Oakland, California, cleaning a leather saddle on the hood of a beat-up Subaru.

Tarver took a picture in 1993 of a demure court reporter in Oakland dressed in a heather gray suit dutifully notating a trial being argued in court. That’s her day job. The facing page shows the same woman dressed in western regalia, gritting her teeth in fury while riding a rodeo horse.

There’s nothing demure about her on top of the horse. The page spread is a Jekill-to-Hyde transition.

“You’re on top of a 1,500-pound animal going 40 miles an hour. You have to share the same intensity that horse shows,” Tarver explained. “The horses know. They know if you don’t know what you’re doing. They’ll throw you in a second.”

Aside from an introductory essay in which Tarver explains the origins of the photos in “The Long Ride Home” and another essay tracing the history of the Black cowboy by Art T. Burton, a retired professor of history at Prairie State College in Illinois, very little is explained. Most of the people in the photos are not identified, only the location and the year of the picture.

Tarver did not set out to tell the story of the Black cowboy. He wanted the vintage shots from 30 years ago to speak for themselves.

“I didn’t want to have a documentary book. I wanted to have a book that celebrated the lifestyle of Black people who share this western heritage,” he said. “Just, for lack of a better word, beautiful images of this lifestyle and people enjoying this culture.”

For Jordan Bullock, these images from his childhood era remind him of what is not there anymore. Most of those stables he names are not there anymore. The old-timers have died, including his own father from COVID-19, taking volumes of accumulated horse knowledge with them.

“My world is rapidly dying,” he said. “You do get kids coming around that want to learn, but the sad part is that they don’t have the elders that I had. I’m the older guy now. I’m 43, but I grew up with guys who were way older than that. I’m really the last of the Mohicans.”

2024, AUG. 31

WHYY

A Philly photographer captures the glory days of the Black cowboy

Peter Crimmins

When Ron Tarver first photographed Jordan Bullock in 1993, he was just a 12-year-old kid growing up in North Philadelphia who was mad for horses, just like his old man, Bumpsey Bullock, who ran the White House stables in Brewerytown.

More than 30 years ago, Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Ron Tarver began photographing Black cowboys, rodeo queens, and ranchers across the southern plains of east Texas, the low hills of Oklahoma, and the urban pathways of Philadelphia.

On assignment for National Geographic and The Philadelphia Inquirer, Tarver captured generations of cowboys and cowgirls working in their stables, strutting in small-town parades, or cooking breakfast inside their ranch-style homes. After failed attempts to thread the detailed portraits and textured landscapes into a book project, Tarver put away nearly 20,000 pictures in a storage container.

In the years since, Tarver published a book about the experiences of African American war veterans and became an associate art professor at Swarthmore College after a 30-plus-year career in photojournalism.

His new book The Long Ride Home: Black Cowboys in America finally releases on Saturday. A week later, Tarver will be doing a book signing, sponsored by the Print Center, at the 20 / 20 Photo Festival Photo Book Fair at Cherry Street Pier on Sept. 7. The book photos will also be on display at InLiquid Gallery as part of their Brotherly Lens: A Portrait of Philadelphia exhibition, which is also part of the 20 / 20 festival.

“This is one of those projects that wouldn’t leave me alone for the longest time,” said Tarver. “It’s always been on my mind because it’s such an important project to get out into the public.”

Black cowboy culture’s recent renaissance in pop culture may have started with the 2020 North Philadelphia-set western Concrete Cowboy, starring Idris Elba. Musicians from Lil Nas X to Beyoncé have also straddled horses and donned bolo ties for songs honoring the Old West.

For Tarver, the timing is perfect. “It’s out in the zeitgeist now,” he said. His book’s 110 images showcase the deep roots of the country’s Black cowboys and cowgirls.

Tarver’s The Long Ride Home isn’t the act of an outsider looking into Black cowboy culture. He lived it.

Tarver grew up in Fort Gibson, Okla., where he rode horses bareback, attended rodeo shows, and spent his summers working on local farms and his cousin’s ranch.

His grandfather, Thomas Wilson, was a working cowboy in the 1940s. His father, Richard, introduced Tarver to the world of documentary-style photography.

It wasn’t until Tarver, now an Elkins Park resident, moved to Philadelphia in 1983 that he realized how unacquainted people were with the Black West.

“The bottom line was people didn’t think there was such a thing as a Black cowboy. I got all kind of strange feedback [on the book] from people literally saying, ‘I don’t think there’s an audience for this. I don’t think there’s any kind of thing or entity as a Black cowboy.’ So, that’s why I put this thing in a box and just said, ‘Forget about it.’”

According to Smithsonian Magazine, one out of every four cowboys who were “trailblazing, sharpshooting, and horseback-riding” on the American frontier were Black. And with the release of The Long Ride Home, Tarver plans to paint a vivid picture of the culture’s history and grandeur.

Liz Spungen, executive director of the Print Center, said Tarver faced many roadblocks with the book’s release. But she’s thrilled to see the decades-long project come to life, and to have the capacity to showcase his work in a planned exhibition in fall 2026.

“I think there’s probably a more receptive audience for it now … people are now more eager, I hope, to understand the larger contributions of Black Americans in the West. We are more attuned to hearing these stories now, so I’m hoping it will receive a fabulous audience.”

With renewed interest in his Black Western project, Tarver was tasked with cutting down his 20,000-image collection to a book-size number. He focused on the years between 1992 and 1996, and zeroed in on photos of everything from the rodeo shows to the after-hour hangs.

“I wanted to show that this isn’t a fad,” Tarver said. “I wanted to show the broad spectrum of Black Western lifestyle, and its vibrance even as far back as then.”

Tarver narrowed it down to 250 photos, and then tapped longtime friend and former NatGeo magazine photo editor Elizabeth Krist to pare the project down even further.

Through the editing process, Krist was impressed by the stark contrast between Tarver’s detail-rich portraits and “visceral action shots.”

A founding member of the Visual Thinking Collective, Krist is hopeful the book opens people’s eyes to the lived culture of Black cowboys, both then and now. “It’s an ongoing culture. It’s not something you look back and think, ‘OK, that was the 1800 or 1900s.’ This is something that is still going on. I hope people really understand it on a deep level when they see his work.”

Once the final lineup of photos was selected, New Mexico-based designer David Skolkin stepped in. He was in awe of Tarver’s ability to meld his journalistic practices with his creative nuance.

The two men connected on long phone calls and Zoom meetings for months to finalize the layout and photo sequencing for The Long Ride Home. “It was like figuring out a puzzle,” Tarver said.

“The images felt very real to me. I could feel the people, sense their emotions, and could even sense how things smelled in the environment of the photographs. They had a texture that was very accessible to me,” Skolkin said of the final book.

As Tarver prepares for the book’s release, he’s reminded of the people he connected with throughout his career. Many of the children he photographed in the early 1990s have carried on their family’s legacy of farming and cowboy culture.

He hopes to develop another book that’s dedicated to the families he first photographed. He also wants his images to be placed in national museums and global showcases to continue sharing the story of the Black West for people to celebrate its largely undocumented glory.

“We all built this country,” Tarver said, “and to remind people that we were in this culture and have been for a long time is important. I hope this book carries out that idea, as well as the beauty and majesty of it.”

2024, AUG. 29

The Philadelphia Inquirer

The Philly photographer who spent decades photographing the beauty and majesty of Black cowboys

Earl Hopkins

More than 30 years ago, Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Ron Tarver began photographing Black cowboys, rodeo queens, and ranchers across the southern plains of east Texas, the low hills of Oklahoma, and the urban pathways of Philadelphia.

Many stereotypes of the American cowboy are more firmly rooted in Hollywood than in reality.

We’ve talked before about Black cowboys and the Black rodeo circuit, but a new book, “The Long Ride Home: Black Cowboys in America,” is among the first to tell the story of the Black cowboy experience in contemporary America.

Ron Tarver, the author and photographer behind the book, joined the Texas Standard to talk about his work.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity:

Texas Standard: I understand you grew up just across the Texas border in Oklahoma but spent a long time at the Philadelphia Inquirer. Not exactly the first place that comes to mind when you think of cowboys, but one of the reasons we have this book today is because of an experience you had a couple of decades back, seeing Black cowboys in Philly.

Ron Tarver: Oh, yeah. I was working on a story for the Philadelphia Inquirer magazine, on drugs and the heroin epidemic, actually. And I’d been working on that for about a year and a half, and I was just so burnt out after that story that I wanted to find a story that was, first of all, in color — and that had a little bit of joy to it. I thought it would be a light story for the magazine.

And so I pitched to my editors about these Black cowboys. It’s sort of a scene in Philadelphia, seeing these guys sort of riding up and down the roads and in the parks and places. So I thought, well, I’d just like to check that out and see what’s going on. And so that’s where the whole story got started.

But then you started to get an avalanche of mail — a lot of this is pre-email, I’m guessing — from readers who were just blown away by these images that you captured.

Yeah. I mean, I grew up in Oklahoma. My relatives had ranches and farms and things, and there was a rodeo right up the street from me. We would spend our Saturdays going to the barn and whatnot. I thought it’d be a nice story, but I didn’t anticipate the amount of surprise from our readers.

I mean, people were saying, “is this a real thing? I can’t believe it. These pictures are so nice, where did you shoot them?”

And, after that, I told my editors, why don’t we go out and continue this story for Black History Month? And they let me do that, and National Geographic picked up and it just carried on from there. And it’s been a 30 year trip.

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You gathered something north of 15,000 images? How did you winnow it down from that?

There were around 15,000 slides. These are all transparencies, so this is way before the digital era. And during COVID, I went through them and I contacted a friend of mine who was a former editor at Geographic, who was just an amazing editor.

And she sat down with me and we just whittled through them and just got it down to I think around 5,000, and from there 2,000 to 1,000 to get it down to a manageable size of I think 500. And then we settled on 120 or 150 for the book.

I suppose I still need to ask you if you could give us your thoughts on what it means for cowboys to exist in contemporary society, and in particular the Black cowboy experience.

But I have to note up front that it’s interesting that with these images, the way that they’re structured, there’s not a feeling that there’s a narrative here. I’m thinking that was intentional.

For sure. One of my favorite books of all time was by a photographer, William Allard – he did a book years ago called “Vanishing Breed.” And it was just one of the most simple, beautiful books of cowboy life.

And it wasn’t structured in any sort of narrative. It was just these really beautiful images that sort of highlighted the romance of that lifestyle. And that’s what I modeled the book after. I didn’t want it to be in any sort of narrative structure.

There’s something emotional going on here. I mean, there’s several images that I just can’t shake. One of them is, I think it must have been behind the scenes at a rodeo. And I believe it’s sort of the shadow outline of a cowboy. And in the back you see that brightness from the area where the action goes on. I believe you call it a concrete canyon.

Yeah, actually, that was a parade. When I was done with the story of the cowboys in Philly, they went to a parade. They met some of the Black cowboys in Harlem and went down Fifth Street in Harlem.

And I was on a horse behind him, and I shot this guy, and it just reminded me instead of the big canyons out west, these guys are sort of riding along these concrete canyons. So, again, it’s more sort of poetic and metaphorical of their experience being urban cowboys.

It’s hard to ignore the fact that this book is coming out at a time when we’re seeing Black cowboy culture reach a new place in pop culture. You think of “Cowboy Carter,” Beyoncé’s recent album, and especially seeing a lot of this in music. What do you think’s going on?

It’s so funny. I mean, I tried to get this book published years ago. I had done a book before on Black veterans that was successful. And I took these images back to the editors — this is 20 years ago — and said, hey, how about we do a book on this?

And my editors said, oh, there’s no such thing as Black cowboys. It was just really disheartening because I just got such negative feedback from it.

I don’t know if it’s just the stars all aligned or what, but this book couldn’t have come out at a more perfect time. Because the whole idea of Black cowboys with Lil Nas X’s song coming out and “Concrete Cowboy,” the Idris Elba movie, and the Bass Reeves show and of course, Beyoncé. It couldn’t have come out in a more perfect time.

When you talk about encountering that resistance earlier on, when you were trying to get this book published, I think a lot of people just are unfamiliar with the story of Black cowboys. When you talk with people about these images, and about the Black cowboy experience, how do you communicate that?

The book, like I said, celebrates this Western heritage that African Americans have. And it’s not anything new; we have always had a Western heritage.

If you look at where a lot of folks came up during the Great Migration from the south up to the north, they brought all those traditions with them, and they established stables and things like that in big cities. That heritage has always been here. It’s just been invisible, as a lot of Black culture has been invisible for so many years.

So I think it’s a matter of just opening the box and looking inside and saying, look, this has always existed. Black people have always had a Western experience. It’s not a fad. It’s nothing that just sort of sprang up out of nowhere. It’s always been.

What do you hope people get out of the book?

I just hope people enjoy looking at the photos. I hope people look at it and just let it soak in, because it’s not trying to do anything but say look at this lifestyle and look at these folks and look at where these people are.

They’re in the cities, they’re in the suburbs, they’re in the ranches. It’s everywhere. There’s kids, there’s older people. It’s not trying to be anything outside of what it is. They’re just supposed to be images to enjoy.

2024, AUG. 21

The Texas Standard

‘The Long Ride Home’: New photo book spotlights Black cowboys in contemporary America

Sarah Asch

Many stereotypes of the American cowboy are more firmly rooted in Hollywood than in reality. We’ve talked before about Black cowboys and the Black rodeo circuit, but a new book, “The Long Ride Home: Black Cowboys in America,” is among the first to tell the story of the Black cowboy experience in contemporary America.

Tarver, a Pulitzer Prize-, Pew Fellowship-, and Guggenheim Fellowship-winning photographer is a natural pioneer of contemporary Black cowboy photography. Growing up in Fort Gibson, Okla., with Black cowboys as an ordinary part of his life, he rode horses, went to rodeos, spent summer days on his cousin's ranch, or working on local farms. His grandfather, Thomas Wilson, was a working cowboy in the 1940s. His father, Richard, was an avid photographer who documented the local Black community, teaching Tarver how to do the same.

When Tarver moved to Philadelphia in 1983, he was surprised by how uninformed people were about Black cowboys. The revelation spurred his dedication to photographing of Black cowboys, including on assignments for National Geographic and The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Tarver’s retrospective arrives right on time, showcasing the trailblazers who are bringing wider recognition to Black cowboys for their vital role in American history and contemporary culture. Across music, fashion, and film, works centering Black cowboy culture — such as Beyonce’s Cowboy Carter (2024), Pharrell Williams’ Louis Vuitton American Western FW24 Collection, David Oyelowo's Lawmen: Bass Reeves (2023), Tanner Adell’s Buckle Bunny (2023), Jordan Peele's Nope (2022), Idris Elba’s Concrete Cowboy (2021), and Lil Nas X’s time-travel western Old Town Road (2019) — have reached indelible success.

The Long Ride Home: Black Cowboys in America is now available for pre-order from Amazon and GFT Publishing, and will be released on September 7, 2024. In celebration of The Long Ride Home’s release, 40 large format prints will travel the states in an exhibition sponsored by The Print Center in Philadelphia.

2024, AUG. 15

All About Photo

The Long Ride Home: Black Cowboys in America by Ron Tarver

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Acclaimed photographer and Swarthmore College art professor Ron Tarver corrects the American cowboy narrative with The Long Ride Home: Black Cowboys in America (George F. Thompson Publishing, 2024).

2024, AUG. 15

San Antonio Express News

San Antonio is all over Pulitzer-winning photographer’s new book on Black cowboys

Elizabeth L. T. Moore

At some point during the Multicultural Western Heritage Trail Ride from Brackettville to San Antonio’s Union Stock Yards for a cattle sale in 1994, photographer Ron Tarver decided he wanted an aerial shot to show the expanse of the Texas landscape.

The first time Ron Tarver got on an airplane was at age 24 to interview for a staff photographer position at the Philadelphia Inquirer. Next thing he knew, the paper was sending out movers to his home in Oklahoma, where he had worked for his first two years out of college as the first Black photojournalist for the Muskogee Phoenix.

“It was just like, a complete head trip,” Tarver, now a photography professor at Swarthmore College and a Pulitzer Prize winner, recalled in an interview with Hyperallergic. “I never lived in a big city before … I thought, wait, there are more people out here than I’ve ever seen in my life.”

Tarver’s move from his home state early in his career would eventually lead him to capture the photos that comprise his new book coming out next month. The Long Ride Home: Black Cowboys in America (George F. Thompson Publishing) documents the lives of America’s working Black cowboys, with an accompanying exhibition in the works. Long before pop-culture phenomena like Beyoncé’s 2024 Cowboy Carter album and Lil Nas X’s 2018 “Old Town Road” celebrated the legacy of Black cowboy culture, Tarver pushed for their recognition, sometimes unsuccessfully.

After reporting for the Philadelphia Inquirer on a particularly grueling story of what he only referred to as “the worst of human tragedy,” Tarver realized he wanted to shift gears. “I was so depressed after that story,” he explained. “I said, ‘For the next story I want to do something that’s colorful, that has a little bit of joy to it.’”

In 1993, Tarver settled on photographing Black cowboys after seeing them “popping” out of Philadelphia’s parks. His editor at the Inquirer approved his pitch, and after the photo collection ran in the paper’s now-defunct magazine, Tarver said he received more mail from readers than he had for any story he’d ever worked on.

After receiving a grant from National Geographic to continue documenting Black cowboys, Tarver shot about 15,000 photographs across the country, including in Oakland and New York City, over the course of six months. Selections from these rolls make up The Long Ride Home.

When he set out, Tarver had no fixed methodology to find and photograph cowboys. For one image, Tarver said he asked around for an “Annie Oakley-type character,” which led him to Stillwater, Oklahoma, to photograph a woman named Betsy Bromwell. One photograph led to another, and then another.
“I was asking people down there if they knew somebody who really worked and lived the life of a quintessential cowboy,” Tarver said.

In the 30 years since shooting this collection of photography, Tarver has attempted to find various homes for his work. Some success came in the form of museum exhibitions, including the Studio Museum in Harlem’s group show Black Cowboy (2016–17).

The Long Ride Home will debut in published form nearly 20 years after Tarver’s first photography book, We Were There: Voices of African American Veterans, from World War II to the War in Iraq (Amistad Press, 2005). And there’s a reason it took so long.

When he approached publishers about his latest book, editors questioned whether Black cowboys even existed. One editor, he said, thought the subjects of his photographs were wearing cowboy costumes.
“And I’m like, ‘No, there are actual working cowboys out in America that make their living on ranches,’” Tarver recalled.

Tarver himself grew up working on farms, and his family members had ranches in Oklahoma. But it was through his conversations with the cowboys for this project that he discovered research investigating the racist, anti-Black roots of the term “cowboy” itself.

“Ranch bosses would refer to Black hired hands as ‘boys,’ as in, ‘Get me this, boy, or get me that, boy. Get that cow, boy.’ So, the name stuck. That’s my version and the version of most of the cowboys I know,” Tarver explained in an email.

Despite earlier rejections, Tarver says he is pleased that the book is coming out now, partly crediting the influence of Beyoncé.
“If this book had come out when I wanted it to, it would have been long forgotten,” Tarver remarked.

Two exhibitions will accompany the book: one held this fall in Norman, Oklahoma, and the other in fall 2026 at the Print Center in Philadelphia.
If all goes well with his launch, Tarver wants to track down the subjects in The Long Ride Home who were children at the time and document their lives 30 years later.

For now, Tarver writes in his foreword that he hopes his collection of photographs will inspire readers to consider what he calls the “visual poetry” of Black cowboy heritage in America.

2024, AUG. 8

Hyperallergic

Photographing the Lives of Black American Cowboys

Isa Farfan

The Long Ride Home brings together selections from Ron Tarver’s 15,000 images chronicling Black cowboy culture across the US.

Before Beyoncé released "Cowboy Carter," award-winning photographer and educator Ron Tarver made it his mission to correct the American cowboy narrative and highlight Black cowboys. Even so, he says the superstar's impact is profound.

The Swarthmore College art professor spent the past three decades photographing Black cowboys around the U.S. Tarver first started the project in Pennsylvania while on assignment for the Philadelphia Inquirer, and his work expanded after National Geographic gave him a grant to photograph cowboys across the country.

Now Tarver says it has become his mission to showcase this particular community that he says has always existed but hasn't always been recognized.

"I grew up in Oklahoma and grew up sort of in this culture," he says. "I mean, I have family that have ranches and I spent my time during the summer working on ranches and hauling hay and doing all the other things you do in a small agricultural town."

His upcoming book titled "The Long Ride Home: Black Cowboys in America" along with corresponding exhibitions aim to educate the public about Black cowboys and correct narratives surrounding American cowboys by highlighting a culture that has existed since the start of his work and still today.

Tarver says the lack of knowledge around Black cowboys created challenges for him when he first began this project.

"As it as I went on, I was really happy with the images but then I started seeing all this pushback," he says. "I tried to publish this book like 25 years ago. And I remember getting responses from acquisition editors saying there's no such thing as Black cowboys. And it was just really disheartening."
While his work began way before Beyoncé released "Cowboy Carter," Tarver appreciates how she's fueled the conversation.

"She she grew up in that – in the Houston area," he says. "So, she's speaking from experience and also from that musical knowledge of who was out there."

As fans know, the megastar released her highly acclaimed album on March 29 and has already made history and broken multiple records. And Beyoncé has undoubtedly been a huge catalyst for the recent spotlight on Black country artists and the genre's roots.

"I really have to give a shout out to Beyoncé's album for calling out some of the country Western singers that were Black that never got recognized," Tarver says. "I have to say, it's a little baffling to me that with all this coverage out there – I don't know if people are just blind to it or they don't want to acknowledge it – but I still have people say this is the first they ever heard of it."

He recognizes the larger implications of his work and artists like Beyoncé bringing awareness to his subject.

"That conversation just continues to grow. And it continues to recognize people that came before all of us that were pushing this idea of Black Western heritage, that didn't get recognized back in the '60s and '50s," Tarver says. "I see us all as just one gigantic mouthpiece for the Black heritage."

2024, AUG. 7

USA Today

Before 'Cowboy Carter,' Ron Tarver spent 30 years photographing Black cowboys

Caché McClay

Before Beyoncé released "Cowboy Carter," award-winning photographer and educator Ron Tarver made it his mission to correct the American cowboy narrative and highlight Black cowboys. Even so, he says the superstar's impact is profound.

2024, FEB. 20

WHYY

Michener Museum shows 40 years of helping artists get a leg up

Peter Crimmins

A retrospective at Michener Museum features artists who have gained professional development over the last four decades.

At one point, the greenhouse in Elkins Park had been abandoned for so long, the overgrowth inside hung from the ceilings and spilled out of missing window panes, obscuring sunlight from breaking through. Now, light floods through its glass again, panels etched with the faces of gun violence victims, repurposed into a project that calls itself House of the Living.

The name draws inspiration from The Book of the Living in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower. In the novel, the protagonist has created a belief system from which she spreads word of central tenets — such as every person’s ability to effect change, the importance of community, and revisioning a better tomorrow. House of the Living founder and Associate Professor of Art at Swarthmore College, Ron Tarver, says the idea of turning the greenhouse into a memorial for gun violence victims came to him while walking by it with his dog Winston one day during the pandemic.

In the middle of Covid, there was nowhere Tarver could immediately bring the idea. But about a year later, while walking by the site again, he ran into Brandon Ritter, Chief Operating Officer of FarmerJawn & Friends Foundation Fund, who was working on the greenhouse. The food justice nonprofit had leased five acres of land on the Elkins Estate in Elkins Park where House of the Living is located. From that fortuitous meeting, Tarver’s idea began to take shape.

“For the families it’s more alive. For them it’s like, it’s a spirit and the being of their families is still alive. It’s a very different experience than going to the cemetery. It’s as though their presence is still here.” -Laura Oliver

Tarver found a partner in FarmerJawn, the CSA (community-supported agriculture) farm, as well as EMIR Healing Center, a nonprofit that provides grief counseling and trauma healing services to families who have lost loved ones to homicide. When the project is finished — it is still in its first phase — FarmerJawn will operate it as an active greenhouse. Also, Tarver and Laura Oliver, the site’s project manager, plan to rework the landscape nearby to include seating and ADA-compliant infrastructure to host programming for the families EMIR works with, like wellness workshops and farming.

The group’s collaborative work has been driven by a shared purpose: creating a judgment-free space for people who have lost someone to find solace and be with their loved one where they can heal from, rather than revisit, their trauma.

Portraits of victims are engraved onto 24 by 24-inch plexiglass panels; the house will be filled with 410 panels at its completion. “That’s how many it holds. But it’s [also] coincidental that that approximates the number of homicides in Philadelphia in an average year,” says Tarver.

Jody Joyner, Assistant Professor of Art at Swarthmore, has been instrumental in transforming the greenhouse into the memorial. Tarver asked if she would take part in the project to offer her expertise in 3D design; she happened to be teaching a class called “Sculpture and the Environment” and incorporated the greenhouse project into the first part of the semester. Students were so engaged that they decided to continue throughout the whole semester.

So far, the greenhouse features about 90 portraits created by the Swarthmore students, who burned the panels into acrylic in Swarthmore’s MakerSpace. Student artists have created another 11 panels, which will soon be installed as well.

I first visited House of the Living on a Friday morning in mid-October. Taking back roads to arrive at the beautiful natural surroundings afforded by Elkins Park, it was clear that the environment is what makes it such a peaceful spot for families to visit and stay for a while. “You barely hear cars, but you hear all the birds,” says Oliver.

The front face of the greenhouse is completed, including the entrance, which reads House of the Living, and most of the right side. Tarver says the portraits are meant to depict victims just as they were in life. They capture the subject in a moment of joy, or candidly, not quite holding a pose but caught as if someone might have told them to look right over at the camera. “They’re portraits that sort of best describe who that person was,” Tarver says.

While walking around the walls of the house, what stands out is that the portraits are still, though not solemn. “For the families it’s more alive. For them it’s like, it’s a spirit and the being of their families is still alive. It’s a very different experience than going to the cemetery. It’s as though their presence is still here,” Oliver says.

Approaching victims’ families with compassion

When it came to getting in touch with families who might have been interested in participating in House of the Living, the team connected with EMIR Healing Center. Chantay Love, Co-Founder and President of EMIR, says that in getting families on board, it was important, above all, to move at a pace with which they felt safe and comfortable. While Swarthmore students were requesting photos for engraving the panels, they held trauma-informed interviews with the families with support from EMIR counselors. Love says, “They had to have an awareness of what families and individuals go through when they lose someone. So that’s what some folks may not see is a big thing — you asking a family, So, well, tell me what happened. That’s traumatizing. And you don’t always need the story to understand or have compassion for a person.”

“It’s more about celebrating a life that now is lost, and how that life can continue to live on through the plants that we’re growing, through the sun that’s shining through these panes of glass that are growing new plants, and then these plants are being put out into a field so that they can nourish a community.” –Christa Barfield

Love says doing the work of healing after such tragedies is also about changing a larger landscape. “How do we hopefully heal a community and heal a city after something so tragic has happened?” she asks. Part of it is addressing the state of our disinvested communities. It’s a question Christa Barfield, CEO of FarmerJawn, is helping to answer through her organization’s work against food injustice. As a CSA, FarmerJawn provides workforce development and agricultural education through its nonprofit arm, FarmerJawn & Friends Foundation Fund; it strives to impact the social, environmental, and physical wellbeing of places where food scarcity exists, which are also predominantly communities of color.

Partnering with House of the Living is a natural extension of FarmerJawn’s motto, “Agriculture is the culture.” Barfield says, “For this particular project we have an ability to be able to revere these individuals who lost their lives to gun violence, regardless of the situation and who they were and things that they’ve done, none of that matters here — it’s more about celebrating a life that now is lost, and how that life can continue to live on through the plants that we’re growing, through the sun that’s shining through these panes of glass that are growing new plants, and then these plants are being put out into a field so that they can nourish a community.”

House of the Living is open to the public daily from dawn until dusk. Find it at Beech Avenue and Cedar Lane, Elkins Park, houseoftheliving.net.

2023, NOV. 9

The Philadelphia Citizen

House of the Living

Erinda Sheno

A new Elkins Park-based exhibit pays respect to victims of gun violence, while giving all Philadelphians a space to reflect and heal

A quick internet search of “American cowboy” yields a predictable crop of images. Husky men with weathered expressions can be seen galloping on horseback. They’re often dressed in denim or plaid, with a bandana tied ’round their neck and a cowboy hat perched atop their head. Lassos are likely being swung overhead. And yes, they’re all white.
Contrary to what the homogenous imagery depicted by Hollywood and history books would lead you to believe, cowboys of color have had a substantial presence on the Western frontier since the 1500s. In fact, the word “cowboy” is believed by some to have emerged as a derogatory term used to describe Black cowhands.
A photography exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem celebrated the legacy of the “Black Cowboy” while chronicling the unlikely places around the country where cowboy culture thrives today. Through their photographs, artists like Brad Trent, Deanna Lawson and Ron Tarver work to retire the persistent myth that equates cowboys with whiteness.
In the 1870s and ’80s, the Village Voice reports, approximately 25 percent of the 35,000 cowboys on the Western Frontier were black. And yet the majority of their legacy has been whitewashed and written over.

One notable example of this erasure manifests in the story of Bass Reeves, a slave in Arkansas in the 19th century who later became a deputy U.S. marshal, known for his ace detective skills and bombastic style. (He often disguised himself in costume to fool felons and passed out silver dollars as a calling card.) Some have speculated that Reeves was the inspiration for the fictional Lone Ranger character.
Most people remain unaware of the black cowboy’s storied, and fundamentally patriotic, past. “When I moved to the East Coast, I was amazed that people had never heard of or didn’t know there were black cowboys,” photographer Ron Tarver said in an interview with The Duncan Banner. “It was a story I wanted to tell for a long time.”
In 2013 Tarver set out to document black cowboy culture, in part as a tribute to his grandfather, a cowboy in Oklahoma in the 1940s. “He worked on a ranch and drove cattle from near Braggs to Catoosa.”
Another artist, Brad Trent, shot striking black-and-white portraits of members of the Federation of Black Cowboys in Queens, New York, an organization devoted to telling the true story of black cowboys’ heritage while providing educational opportunities for local youth to learn from the values and traditions of cowboy life.
Kesha Morse, the FBC president, described their mission as using “the uniqueness of horses as a way to reach inner-city children and expose them to more than what they are exposed to in their communities.”
Trent’s images capture how much has changed for black cowboys, who now dwell not only on the Western Front but on the city streets of New York and in rodeos held in state prisons. Yet certain values of cowboy culture remain intact. For Morse, it’s the importance of patience, kindness and tolerance.

We would add: and a very cool hat.

2023, NOV. 1

Huffpost

A History Of Black Cowboys And The Myth That The West Was White

Priscilla Frank

Most people remain unaware of the black cowboy’s storied, and fundamentally patriotic, past. “When I moved to the East Coast, I was amazed that people had never heard of or didn’t know there were black cowboys,” photographer Ron Tarver said in an interview with The Duncan Banner. “It was a story I wanted to tell for a long time.”