Black Cowboys in America: Photographs by Ron Tarver

From before the Civil War, Black cowboys played an active role in the building of the American West working alongside white and brown cowboys wrangling horses, branding cattle, and steering herds long distances on cattle drives. They lived a nomadic and often lonely life—one that helped shape the myth of the American cowboy in popular culture as a symbol of this country’s individualism and freedom. Yet, until recently, when Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter album and Pharrell Williams’s Louis Vuitton collection shined a spotlight on the proud history of Black cowboys, their existence has seldom been acknowledged.

Through forty photographs, Black Cowboys in America illuminates this Black cowboy life on ranches, at rodeos, and in urban streetscapes—portraits of African Americans who share a Western heritage. In the early 1990s, Ron Tarver, then a photojournalist for The Philadelphia Inquirer, set out to document the rich visual narrative of Black cowboy life. Tarver’s photographs are a tribute to a way of life both enduring and evolving. They capture the beauty, romance, and visual poetry of cowboy culture while reflecting a renewed interest within the Black community in reclaiming its Western roots. This exhibition affirms the thriving culture of Black-owned ranches, rodeo operations, parades, inner-city riders, and retired cowhands—and invites deeper conversation about what it means to be an American cowboy.

A Pulitzer Prize–winning photographer, Ron Tarver distinguished himself in the fields of photojournalism and fine-art photography on the staff of The Philadelphia Inquirer for thirty-two years. He has exhibited his photographs nationally and internationally in over thirty solo and fifty group exhibitions and earned Guggenheim and Pew Fellowships. Though quick to point out that he is not a cowboy, Tarver worked on farms and ranches as a teenager, even rounding up cattle on a dirt bike. His late grandfather, Thomas Wilson, drove cattle as a member of the Black Freedmen of the Cherokee Tribe. Currently, Tarver is an associate professor of art at Swarthmore College.

The exhibition is accompanied by the catalog The Long Ride Home: Black Cowboys in America (George F. Thompson Publishing, 2024) by Ron Tarver, with an essay by Art T. Burton, an expert on the history of Black cowboys. This 160-page, fully illustrated volume features more than one hundred photographs from Tarver’s series. The book has received numerous honors, including a 2025 Gold IPPY Award for Photography, a 2025 Next Generation Indy Book Award Winner in the African American (Nonfiction) category and Best Cover Design (Non-fiction), and a 2024 Foreword Indies Silver Medal for Best Photography Book.

This exhibition is sponsored by Peter French, DeWayne N. Phillips and Caroline A. Wamsler, PhD, Nicholas C. Pierce and Donna Peterson, and Elizabeth Wedemeyer and John Gunther-Mohr. Additional sponsorship provided by Clare Bell, Cheryl Calegari, and Brian Dore.

Exhibitions are made possible in part by assistance provided by the County of Westchester and the City of Yonkers.