Rope and Revolver at Catharine Clark Gallery

In 2023, I saw Ansel Adams in Our Time at San Francisco’s de Young Museum. Along with Adams’ famous gelatin silver photographs of national parks and the Southwest, the show had work by contemporary photographers such as Binh Dahn and Meghann Riepenhoff, and it aimed to present a narrative of the West that didn’t depict it as a vast, empty land ready for settlement. I was thinking about this show and how art and the way institutions present it isn’t neutral when I saw Rope and Revolver: Artists Respond to Frederic Remington’s ‘The Broncho Buster’, the engaging exhibition at San Francisco’s Catharine Clark Gallery.

More than 275 casts were made of the small bronze statue Remington created in 1895. It shows a man, holding a whip, firmly in the saddle on a rearing bucking horse, a contest between nature and man, with man primed to win. This statue presented the idea of the cowboy as triumphing through strength and force. The seven artists in the show—Sandow Birk, Michael Goldin, Charles Lee, Deborah Oropallo, Andy Rappaport, Stephanie Syjuco, and Wanxin Zhang—through video, photography, painting, and sculpture comment on the idea the statue came to symbolize Manifest Destiny, or white settlers having the right to expand across the North American continent.

Three massive photos by Syjuco, made while she was at a residency at Fort Worth’s Amon Carter Museum of American Art, were an inspiration for Rope and Revolver. Syjuco was interested by items in the museum’s collection that presented what she calls a fiction of the West. Her photos at Catharine Clark show the statue–with preparator’s tools, such as color calibration charts and gloves—as a way of emphasizing that actual people at institutions have made deliberate choices about how to show this work.

A 2018 show of Oropallo’s at the gallery, Dark Landscapes for a White House, was another impetus for this exhibition. Fascinated by Remington’s piece being on the president’s desk for half a century on and off, she made a video, Oval O, showing the presidents of her lifetime with the statue. Rappaport did the sound design. For Rope and Revolver, the two have a new short video, WOUNDED, 2024, which plays in the first room of the gallery near Syjuco’s photos. It shows images of the statue and other bronze pieces inspired by it, along with images from Westerns. The soundtrack has the insistent beat of the 1972 song by the Native American band Redbone: “We Were All Wounded Knee.” The words contrast the images on the screen.

Visitors can sit on a leather couch or a cowhide chair to watch the video. On the coffee table in front of the couch are Harpers’ Weekly (for which Remington drew illustrations) and other magazines, mostly East Coat-based, that also created narratives of the West, about as close to reality as recent accounts of Haitian immigrants eating pets in Ohio. Growing up in the 60s, Rappaport played Cowboys and Indians and read dime store novels about cowboys. He says the “sinister” nature of these images didn’t strike him until, as a teenager in 1973, he read about the Wounded Knee Occupation, where members of the American Indian Movement seized the South Dakota town, demanding fair treatment.

Lee’s installation, On Brand, (Sword of Damascus), 2024, makes plain how the idea of the American West and Manifest Destiny are tied to white supremacy. In it, a leather rocking chair sits under a branding iron, making a connection between cattle and chattel and the way both cows and enslaved people were branded. Lee’s photo in the show, True Grit, 2024, shows a man on a horse in the middle of the pasture. The two look serene, in contrast to Remington’s rider with a whip trying to subdue a rearing animal.

Along with this sort of intensity, Rope and Revolver also has humor, like Sandow Birk’s Ever Northwards the Course of Immigration Makes Its Way, 2024-2025, portraying immigrants arriving at the U.S./Mexico border, reimagining the mural Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way (Westward Ho!), (1861) that shows White men triumphing over Indigenous people.

Like Birk, Wanxin Zhang uses sarcasm with A Summit, 2021, referring to global summits. Zhang’s two ceramic horses, one blindfolded and one with a black mark covering its eyes, each with three testicles, were a way of showing the ridiculous amount of swagger that leaders sometimes show at these conferences, flaunting their power and ignoring regular citizens and their need for peace. Goldin also employs satire in his kinetic sculpture Strange Love, 2025, parodying Remington’s bronze as well as referring to a scene from Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, with rodeo performer Slim Pickens straddling a bomb.

All these ways presented in the show to reexamine the ideas of heroism and territorial expansion seem particularly relevant now. For many of us, the hope was that the belief in Manifest Destiny had been left firmly in the past. Yet, the president’s favorable reference to it in his inaugural speech suggests otherwise. He also talked about making Canada the 51st state, acquiring Greenland, and “taking back” the Panama Canal. This reinvention of Remington’s friend Teddy Roosevelt’s “big stick diplomacy”—without speaking softly—makes people question the idea of what it is to be American.