Kevin Jerome Everson in Conversation with Leila Weefur

Why It Matters

The discussion reframes the Western mythos to include Black rural experiences, prompting cultural institutions to re‑examine whose histories are visualized in iconic American landscapes.

Key Takeaways

• Black rodeo culture reclaimed landscape as collaborative, not conquered.
• Long takes emphasize patience, allowing Black labor to breathe.
• Everson and Burnett expose hidden histories within Western mythos.
• Landscape functions as generous witness, not neutral backdrop.
• Curatorial series challenges Western tropes through gender, race, geography.

Summary

The Walker Art Center’s "Landscapes of Myth" series hosted a conversation between artist‑filmmaker Kevin Jerome Everson and curator Leila Weefur, framing two short works—Everson’s Ten Five in the Grass (2011) and Charles Burnett’s The Horse (1973)—as counter‑narratives to the classic Western canon introduced the night before with John Ford’s The Searchers.

Both films treat the Southern grasslands not as empty stage but as an active participant that shelters Black rodeo practitioners and a grieving boy with his dying horse. Everson captures the rhythmic rope work of Black cowboys in Louisiana and Mississippi through extended, un‑edited takes, while Burnett lingers on a boy’s gentle ministrations, allowing the sun‑bleached fields to amplify their intimacy. The dialogue underscores how duration and patient observation let the landscape breathe, revealing a generosity that the genre’s mythic conquest has long obscured.

Leila Weefur described the fields as “generous, protective spaces” that “hold stories waiting for cameras attentive enough to see them.” Everson echoed this, noting that chance, intuition, and calculation converge in his practice, and that the simplicity of a super‑8 camera let him blend into the rodeo’s everyday flow. Their exchange highlighted the rarity of Black rural representation and the necessity of foregrounding labor, ritual, and loss without exoticizing them.

By re‑situating Black labor within the iconic Western terrain, the program challenges entrenched narratives of manifest destiny and invites institutions to reconsider archival priorities. The conversation signals a broader shift in museum programming toward inclusive histories, suggesting that future curatorial projects may increasingly foreground marginalized geographies and the temporal patience required to reveal them.

Original Description

Ten Five in the Grass is an exploration of the Black rodeo circuit in the South. Through a blend of documentary realism and poetic imagery, Kevin Jerome Everson captures the grit, skill, and community spirit that define this vibrant subculture. His camera lingers on the ritualistic preparations of riders adjusting stirrups, steadying horses, and transforming mundane gestures into choreographed movements that speak to generations of expertise. The film builds meaning through duration and repetition, as dust clouds rise from arena dirt, metallic gates clang, and bodies move against landscape. Everson allows the physicality of the sport to articulate its own significance, revealing how this familial tradition reclaims Western iconography through embodied knowledge and collective memory. 2011, US, digital, 32 min.

The film is preceded by Charles Burnett’s The Horse (1973). A delicate picture of the complex bond between a young Black boy and an ailing horse in the rural American South, Burnett’s short film is a sociopolitical reminder of the inevitability of death and its threat of imminence in Black life. 1973, US, digital, 13 min.

A conversation with artist and filmmaker Kevin Jerome Everson and series curator Leila Weefur follows the program.