Abduction of the black cowboy

This 72” x 82” Stained glass work was originally commissioned by Ballroom Marfa for its winter 2006 exhibition Your Are Here. You Are Here, the first group exhibition devoted to emerging artists whose work was informed by their experience of urban and suburban life in contemporary American culture. Through the visions of SunTek Chung, Larry Bamburg, Deborah Grant, Andrew Guenther, Hilary Harnischfeger, Adam Helms, Matthew Day Jackson, Karyn Olivier, Sigrid Sandstrom, Allison Smith, Ian Sullivan, Will Villalongo, Roger White, Raphael Zollinger, and an exhibition essay by Mary Robbins, this exhibition sought to address a collective and individual response to a particular moment in time: artists as social and cultural cartographers. These artists illustrated the spectrum of actual and emotional locations that create an ideological map of where we were. They represented all locations, both narrative and symbolic; the dream world, paranoid conformity, urban claustrophobia, suburban alienation, ephemeral monuments, propaganda, anonymous intimacy and finally the reinvention of the American frontier.

The piece was fabricated with Albert Stained Glass in Brooklyn, NY and installed on the iconic grid of windows on the facade of the Ballroom Marfa building. The piece was exhibited later in 2006 in a solo exhibition “How the West was Won” curated by Tim Peterson at Franklin Art Works in Minneapolis, MN. In this iteration it was installed in a bespoke light box frame before finally residing in a private collection.