Josephine and her cowboy husband
60 x 80 Mixed Media Paper mounted on e-panel
Josephine and her cowboy husband centers the story of a black woman in American Cowboy Mythology. Historians overlook the complexities of our intertwined histories, and the significant role women like her played in Western American frontier settlement. They lived lives filled with joy as well as heartache. They were extraordinary in their ability to recover what was repeatedly stolen and by Being moved a nation closer to liberation. Their experience is an American experience. However, their existence was, for the most part, unworthy of documentation, and their full contribution to the making of the United States mythology ignored. This piece is the first in a series that explores their under appreciated stories of hope, resilience, and success. Though the African presence in the Americas predates the founding of the United States by centuries, this body of work will focus on the presence of African diasporic people in the American Frontier in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.