SF Camerawork Show Honors the Relationship Between Black Cowboys and Their Horses

When the Great Migration led Black families to venture north and west with their eyes on new horizons, many made that journey while maintaining the traditions of their Southern roots, bringing recipes, lessons and practices into new homes.

Richmond artist Charles Lee can trace his own family history back to Southern states like Texas and Louisiana, and those ties now inform his practice. His first solo exhibition, sweat + dirt, on view through Feb. 3, 2024 at SF Camerawork, includes black-and-white photographs and installations — including a horse saddle, rocking chair and bales of hay.

The show transports viewers to the outskirts of big cities, in places like Jennings and Lafayette, Louisiana, where Lee centers the relationships between people and their horses, and explores how the traditions of farmwork have persisted through generations for Black Americans. Lee says he’s interested in the ancestral connection between humans and “this very majestic and important animal.”

“Even before this job came to the Americas, we were herders,” Lee says, referencing On Brand, a large-scale chemigram piece, which also features a branding iron hanging from the gallery ceiling. “Our ancestors were herders, and they didn’t break the cattle or break the horses. It was an agreement that they fostered with this giant animal. Whereas Western ways of training an animal is to break it physically and use violence in order to get it to submit.”

sweat + dirt is an extension of Lee’s 2023 MFA thesis show at California College of the Arts, which, in turn, was part of a project he began in 2016 called BEEN HERE. Seven years after he got the initial idea for a photo series from his cousin, Lee has incorporated videos and found objects into the project. “I had always desired to work with objects,” he says. “So originally those pieces were extensions of the photographic practice that brought it more into an installation piece.”

Lee continues to find new ways to approach the series, recombining earlier work from BEEN HERE with more recent images made during visits with family in Louisiana. It’s been important for him — and for this project — to trace the migratory paths his family followed on their way to different corners of the Bay Area.

“My mom was born in Lafayette, Louisiana and my dad was born in Houston, Texas,” he says about his family’s journey to California. “My mom’s parents were definitely more blue-collar. They grew up on ranches and grew up in the country in Jennings, Louisiana. So when they came here, the culture came with them.”

Horse culture has evolved as people have migrated, and it looks different all over the state of California. In Oakland, at Lake Merritt, it’s not uncommon to see people on horses in the middle of a crowd right alongside other, more modern, modes of conveyance, like dirt bikes and bicycles. “Even though we’re not there anymore, there’s still things that we practice over here in this urban environment,” Lee says. Oftentimes, he points out, “we don’t even know the root.”

Two walls at SF Camerawork display a constellation of variously sized prints, showing people on horses and closeups of horses, all in richly high-contrast black and white. In preparing for his show, Lee took the exhibition title, sweat + dirt, to heart. All of the photos presented at SF Camerawork were developed in a dark room, an intentional and labor-intensive homage to the working people in his pictures.

Lee points out that when images of the cowboy in America are presented, Black people are often left out of the picture. His work places Black cowboys and cowgirls both in front of his lens and in the forefront of his work. What began as a reaction to a missing narrative in the cowboy experience is now a way to create a living document of that experience.

Lee is also expanding beyond the edges of America, working with the Mascogos people in Nacimiento de los Negros, Mexico, a town name which translates to “birth of the Blacks.”

“This project is in no way done,” Lee says, thinking about his next steps. “I’m excited about that new direction of showing another nuance and another layer to this story that brings it south of the border.”

‘sweat + dirt’ is on view at SF Camerawork (Fort Mason Center, 2 Marina Blvd, Building A) through Feb. 3, 2024.