Walker Art Center

Kevin Jerome Everson in Conversation with Leila Weefur

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.