Join us for the opening reception of Rope and Revolver: Artists Respond to Frederic Remington’s The Broncho Buster.
On view January 18 – March 15, 2025
Opening reception: Saturday, January 18 from 3 – 5pm; remarks at 4pm
The exhibition’s title references the work of American artist Frederic Remington (1861–1909), whose paintings, sculptures, and bronzes glorified Manifest Destiny as a form of heroism and westward expansion into unceded territory as a “birthright” of White Americans. While largely understood in a cultural or art historical context, Remington’s work is closely tied to the political project of American imperialism. Remington provided key illustrations for an 1888 article by future U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt—by then a failed cattle rancher but recent appointee to the United States Civil Service Commission—for Century Magazine. In the article, “Frontier Types,” Roosevelt lauded the cowboy ethos, vaunting “the rough-rider of the plains” as the “hero of rope and revolver.” Roosevelt’s celebration—if we can call it that—of the frontier ideology would eventually inform his aggressive “Big Stick” foreign policy, through which his administration annexed neighboring territories such as Hawaii and advocated for interventions in regions such as Panama, often preemptively, where American interests were perceived as being “at risk.” For his own part, Remington was directly tied to the mass production of arms and weapons in the United States as a cousin of Eliphalet Remington, the founder of Remington Arms, one of the first gun manufacturers in the United States. He never saw combat.
Remington created his figurative bronze The Broncho Buster in 1895 after attending the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago and seeing another artist’s interpretation of a frontiersman on horseback. In the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s catalogue The American West in Bronze, Peter Hassrick remarks that Remington’s The Broncho Buster imagined “an emphatic counterbalance” between dueling forces: “In this contest between man and nature, man is positioned to win, with the cowboy virtually guaranteed to stay in the saddle…it garnered applause for its technical achievement, purely American flavor, and ‘extraordinary representation in bronze of wild and violent action.’” Remington’s sculpture was so widely celebrated that over 275 authorized casts were made, an accomplishment which led Remington to declare, “I will endure in bronze.” Today, Remington’s work has become so ubiquitous that it is almost synonymous with 19th-century American art. His work in bronze casting as a more readily “reproducible” medium meant that Remington could realize The Broncho Buster as a multiple, which made him rich. Through its reproduction, The Broncho Buster also disseminated a set of cultural values—of imperialism masked as heroism, and of white male violence disguised as valor—that pervasively infiltrated the collective consciousness of American history through art. Perhaps this is why Remington’s bronze has been consistently on view in the White House’s Oval Office since Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency.
The works in Rope and Revolver are not a direct response to Remington, though many of the projects on view take the likeness of The Broncho Buster and dissect and parody its form. Instead, the seven artists featured in the exhibition take the ethos of Remington’s work as a point of departure to debunk the frontier narrative as a form of mythmaking. Through their respective mediums—video, photography, installation, sculpture, and painting—the artists in Rope and Revolver ask deep questions about what it means to be an American and how we can collectively imagine a more inclusive future.
The exhibition Rope and Revolver features a new painting by Sandow Birk titled Ever Northwards the Course of Immigration Makes Its Way (2025). Birk’s composition reimagines Emanuel Leutze’s iconic and troubling mural, Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way (Westward Ho!) (1861). Leutze, a German immigrant, also painted well-known and arguably propagandistic American paintings such as Indians and Captive and The Storming of Teocalli by Cortez and his Troops. These works, among others, depict heroic white men triumphing over Indigenous people.
In 1860, the U.S. Congress commissioned Leutze to create a massive mural for the Capitol building staircase. His painting, Westward Ho! (a study of which hangs in the Smithsonian, where Birk was Artist in Residence in 2007), depicts a wagon train of white settlers moving from right to left across the canvas, cresting a rocky summit where they glimpse the West and California bathed in golden light. In Leutze's depiction, the American landscape is devoid of anyone except white people struggling against and dominating nature. Indigenous peoples and cultures are absent, their millennia of civilization rendered non-existent. The “empty” continent awaits Anglo-Europeans, who are shown clearing trees and “taming” the land. Leutze’s painting is one of melodrama and pathos, imbued with romantic racism and the dominance and destruction of the natural world.
Ironically mimicking these overly romantic depictions, Birk subverts the racist concept of Manifest Destiny. He depicts not the flow of Europeans from east to west, but rather global migration from south to north. Instead of bold white settlers traversing an uninhabited landscape, Birk’s travelers are men, women, and children arriving atop a rise along the U.S.-Mexico border, their emotions ranging from hope and fatigue to relief, apprehension, and joy. In the distance, the sun gleams on their destination, California.
Birk’s painting depicts the constant ebb and flow of northern immigration not as a problem to be dammed, but as an inevitable force, a tide that has existed since prehistory—unceasing, inevitable, and natural. Immigration has always been a feature of the expansion of the United States, whether through population growth fueled by arrivals from various parts of the world at different times, or through the physical expansion of U.S. territory taken from Mexico over the course of ten invasions by U.S. troops spanning some 65 years.
The exhibition also features On Brand (Sword of Damocles) (2024), a major installation by artist Charles Lee, who is exhibiting at Catharine Clark Gallery for the first time. Using photography, archives, assemblage, drawing, video, and installation, Lee describes his interdisciplinary work as “a metaphor for what Blackness is; a stateless existence that is always in flux and at odds with categorization.” It is a search for the sublime moment within the quotidian. The sublimity in the work lies in its impermanence, its labor-intensive making, and its personal nature. Lee continues, “My work extrudes that which is universally experienced while simultaneously elucidating experiences that are culturally specific and challenge traditional Western epistemologies.” Lee creates multi-sensory experiences in his installations that include smell, sound, and touch in addition to the visual. Using personal and collective Black archives as material, he builds histories and complicates these images by reprinting, pasting, ripping, and fragmenting them, creating large site-specific collages that posit the existence and importance of Blackness in all stages of history.
This installation consists of three components: an archival pigment print “billboard,” a mid-century Spanish Colonial leather rocking chair, and a branding iron hanging ominously over the chair. The print is from a photograph of a site-specific installation Lee created for a solo exhibition about Black cowboys at SF Camerawork. The intention is to highlight the relationship between chattel and cattle. Enslaved Black people were considered property; as such, they were branded as if they were cattle. The original installation was made of Xeroxed prints that were copies of chemigrams Lee made using Vaseline, photo-sensitive paper, and darkroom processing chemicals. In the darkroom, he applied the Vaseline to the branding iron and then stamped it onto ten sheets of photo-sensitive paper. He selected eight unique compositions, scanned them, and then laser-printed them. He intuitively adhered them to a grid, let them dry, and then began applying the prints on top of the grid in a less structured manner, leaving the corners unglued.
Once dried, he began ripping and tearing the prints and reapplying the torn pieces to form the final composition. This process was intended to speak about the dark history of enslavement in the United States without directly showing the Black body in pain. The paper represents flesh. Vaseline, used as a resist in the making process, is often applied to treat burns and flesh wounds—an intentional choice. The chair is made of leather, or cowhide, again pointing to skin. The viewer is invited to sit in the chair, and as gravity leans them backward, they are directed to look up, where they are confronted with the active end of the branding iron, suspended by a rope and attached to that rope using what is called a “lynch pin. This installation is also a reference to Greek mythology and the Sword of Damocles, an allusion to the imminent and ever-present peril faced by those in positions of power. As for the form of the new archival pigment print, it has the same aspect ratio as a billboard, referencing the use of colonial language when we speak about marketing and advertising by calling it “branding.”
The exhibition Rope and Revolver debuts a new video by Deborah Oropallo and Andy Rappaport titled WOUNDED (2025), eight years after their first collaborative work responding to the legacy of Remington, OVAL O (2018). Oropallo and Rappaport write that “WOUNDED is our rumination on how cultural iconography misleads us in mass media. It references the popular TV images that were based on Remington’s fictions and uses images of many of the hundreds of decontextualized sculptures that emulate and respond to Bronco Buster to create a new fiction, set against scenes of the actual West that were missing from Remington’s telling. The soundtrack for this new episode is a song by the Native American band Redbone, released in 1973 and largely denied radio airplay in the U.S. Its accurate reference to the national injury of Wounded Knee was deemed as un-American as the protests of the war in Vietnam. America: propagandize it or leave it.”
Oropallo and Rappaport write that The Broncho Buster “is an image so powerful and so integral to American identity that it was stationed in the Oval Office through the terms of at least eight U.S. presidents in the late 20th century and early 21st. It was the image that spawned the images that dominated mass media while mass media was spawning the myth of American existence. The Broncho Buster is the pure embodiment of our collective legend. Remington is celebrated as a chronicler of the western experience, but was, at heart, a propagandist. His illustrations accompanied popular contemporaneous articles that were as accurate in their depictions of the late 19th-century western frontier as accounts now of Haitians eating pets in Springfield, Ohio. The abandonment of any pretense of coexistence with Native Americans and actions like the slaughter at Wounded Knee are attributable directly to the power of this propaganda. We are all living with the dangerous legacy of The Broncho Buster.”
In conjunction with their collaborative video, Oropallo presents a series of new photomontages that reimagine Remington’s bronzes in chaotic states, harkening to the twisted legacies of Manifest Destiny ideologies in our contemporary consciousness. In the Media Room, Oropallo’s longtime collaborator Michael Goldin debuts his first solo sculpture, STRANGE LOVE (2024), a kinetic ceramic with audio that both parodies Remington’s bronzes and reimagines them through the darkly humorous scene of actor and rodeo performer Slim Pickens as Major ‘King’ Kong in Stanley Kubrick’s Cold War-era satire Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964). In the film’s penultimate scene, Pickens’s character, the cowboy-like commander of a B-52 bomber, fails to abort a planned mission to drop a thermonuclear bomb on a target in the Soviet Union. He repairs a damaged bay door, which triggers the bomb’s deployment and by extension a thermonuclear war between the United States and Soviet Union. Pickens’s character straddles the bomb, hooting and hollering as it drops towards its target – a dark continuation of the destructive machismo implicit in the ethos of the cowboy.
Rope and Revolver features three monumental, framed photographs from Stephanie Syjuco’s series “Set-Up” from her project Double Vision, originally commissioned by the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in 2021 and recently on view in the exhibition Cowboy at the MCA Denver and the Amon Carter Museum of American Art. In this installation, Syjuco reconstituted the Western landscape as seen in canvases by 19th-century painters (particularly Charles Russell and Frederic Remington) largely responsible for crafting a perception of the West as a site of open, lustrous expanse. Reflecting on this project, curator Miranda Lash writes: “Syjuco took that context as her starting point and created a vibrant, immersive environment inspired by paintings from the Amon Carter Museum’s collection along with large-scale photographs of bronze sculptures by Frederic Remington from this same era. The photographs include details of the art preparators’ gloves and tools, and collectively speak to the image-making of the institution. The West, Syjuco seems to argue, was invented not only by the artists but also by the structures and systems of the museums that commission, conserve, and collect their work.”
Wanxin Zhang’s sculptural diptych, A Summit (2021) responds to bilateral summits, such as the G7 and G20. These summits invite displays of power and have historically been fertile ground for conflict, often escalating into international disasters or war. Contemporary crises expose the core of these power struggles: a relentless pursuit of dominance, frequently at the expense of ordinary people. History reminds us that when global powers flex their dominance, the weight inevitably falls upon individuals, resulting in profound catastrophes. Zhang writes that “my diptych employs humor, satire, and sarcasm to critique these dynamics. The use of horse imagery is deliberate, particularly the inclusion of a horse with three symbolic testicles, an absurd yet potent metaphor for exaggerated strength and unnecessary swagger. Through this lens, the piece seeks to call out political leaders and their parties for failing to prioritize peace and the well-being of their citizens.”
