Robert Peterson

Untitled (white horse)

In Untitled (White Horse), Robert Peterson paints a half-nude Black male figure laying on the back of a white horse. The figure wears a pair of dark denim jeans and black leather cowboy boots adorned with tiny rhinestones. With his arms placed behind his head, the figure elongates his nude torso and turns his head to the side to hold the viewer’s gaze. Peterson highlights both the musculature of the man’s torso and the contours of his face with soft undertones of blue, burnt sienna, and yellow. Untitled (White Horse) disrupts the traditional American Western mythology of a “cowboy” as a rugged, quiet, gun-toting, white male who travels across the arid desertscape by horseback. Instead, Peterson creates a meditative, and serene portrait of an Oklahoman Black cowboy highlighted by a silverleaf background. He underscores the ongoing history of Black people as equestrian workers in the American West.