About The Work
This photograph of a Black cowboy in the urban city of Philadelphia pictured against the city's iconic row homes is part of artist Ron Tarver's long-term, ongoing project, "The Long Ride Home: The Black Cowboy Experience in America." This body of work "comprises of photos exploring the lives of Black cowboys - men, women, and children. These are the multifaceted narratives intentionally forgotten in the great American myth of the West. From the concrete jungles of the Northeast to the endless skies of the great West, and all that lays in between, the cowboy spirit thrives. The portraits reaffirm this thriving culture of Black-owned ranches, rodeo operations, parades, inner-city cowboys, retired cowhands, and young rodeo clowns. Few people are aware of the historical role that Black cowboys have played in the West, while still others question their authenticity." - Ron Tarver
Ron Tarver is a professor of Studio Art specializing in Photography at Swarthmore College. He served as a staff photographer at the Philadelphia Inquirer for 32 years, and his work has appeared in National Geographic, Life, Time, Newsweek, The New Yorker, and Black and White Magazine. He is co-author of the book, We Were There: Voices of African American Veterans, published by Harper Collins in 2004, which was accompanied by a traveling exhibition. Tarver shares a 2012 Pulitzer Prize at the Inquirer for his work on a series documenting school violence in the Philadelphia public school system and was nominated for a second Pulitzer in 2013 for a series exploring dog-training programs in prisons. A recipient of the prestigious Pew Fellowship in the Arts, he has also received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, as well as an Independence Foundation Fellowship, and is a current Guggenheim Fellow. He was named one of the Delaware Valley's "50 Rising Stars in the Arts" by Seven Arts Magazine and is a Center for Emerging Visual Artists Fellow. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in over 30 solo and 50 group exhibitions and is included in many private, corporate, and museum collections, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the State Museum of Pennsylvania in Harrisburg, Oklahoma Museum of History, and the National Museum of American Art of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. Tarver offers private photography instruction, workshops, and photo excursions through his company, Photo-Ops.
Photograph
Archival pigment print
17.00 x 26.00 in
43.2 x 66.0 cm
This work is signed, titled, dated, and numbered by the artist on recto.
About The Work
This photograph of a Black cowboy in the urban city of Philadelphia pictured against the city's iconic row homes is part of artist Ron Tarver's long-term, ongoing project, "The Long Ride Home: The Black Cowboy Experience in America." This body of work "comprises of photos exploring the lives of Black cowboys - men, women, and children. These are the multifaceted narratives intentionally forgotten in the great American myth of the West. From the concrete jungles of the Northeast to the endless skies of the great West, and all that lays in between, the cowboy spirit thrives. The portraits reaffirm this thriving culture of Black-owned ranches, rodeo operations, parades, inner-city cowboys, retired cowhands, and young rodeo clowns. Few people are aware of the historical role that Black cowboys have played in the West, while still others question their authenticity." - Ron Tarver
Ron Tarver is a professor of Studio Art specializing in Photography at Swarthmore College. He served as a staff photographer at the Philadelphia Inquirer for 32 years, and his work has appeared in National Geographic, Life, Time, Newsweek, The New Yorker, and Black and White Magazine. He is co-author of the book, We Were There: Voices of African American Veterans, published by Harper Collins in 2004, which was accompanied by a traveling exhibition. Tarver shares a 2012 Pulitzer Prize at the Inquirer for his work on a series documenting school violence in the Philadelphia public school system and was nominated for a second Pulitzer in 2013 for a series exploring dog-training programs in prisons. A recipient of the prestigious Pew Fellowship in the Arts, he has also received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, as well as an Independence Foundation Fellowship, and is a current Guggenheim Fellow. He was named one of the Delaware Valley's "50 Rising Stars in the Arts" by Seven Arts Magazine and is a Center for Emerging Visual Artists Fellow. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in over 30 solo and 50 group exhibitions and is included in many private, corporate, and museum collections, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the State Museum of Pennsylvania in Harrisburg, Oklahoma Museum of History, and the National Museum of American Art of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. Tarver offers private photography instruction, workshops, and photo excursions through his company, Photo-Ops.
This series was Initially published in the "Philadelphia Inquirer Sunday Magazine" and "Daily Paper" in 1993. "The Long Ride Home" was then published on the National Geographic website for ten years. This print is in the collection of The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, and the Petrucci Family Foundation Collection of African American Art, Asbury, NJ.
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