Saddle up! The LA art show re-defining cowboy culture

Against the backdrop of a lush, fiery sunset, two huge, spikeless cacti are embracing. Sitting comfortably between them is a fluffy hybrid man-dog; with a gentle gaze, it reaches up to pet the plants with its long fingers. In return, it seems the cacti reach out their green limbs towards each other, cradling the figure between. Below them, the skull of a longhorn cow rests quietly, the red ribbons on its horns floating in the wind.

This describes a painting by Drew Dodge, A Hug From the Earth. At just 23, he’s just one of the young artists showing work as part of SADDLE UP: Artistic Journeys Through Cowboy Culture, an exhibition exploring the American West, cowboy values and a connection to the land – at Albertz Benda gallery in Los Angeles. Featuring a broad range of artists, SADDLE UP has been curated by fellow artist Devon DeJardin, whose entry into the art world feels like friend-of-a-friend tales exchanged at a party.

The story goes like this: Oregon-born Devon, who in a previous life was a fashion designer, got a message from a stranger on Instagram during his fourth year at university, studying world religions. The stranger offered him $100 in exchange for a ten minute phone call. Presuming it to be an offer from a sugar daddy, he reluctantly accepted — at the very least, the call could buy him some groceries for the week. The man on the other end of the phone told him that he’d been praying for Devon – that he needed to start painting, that it would be good for him. The $100 came through that same week and Devon picked up a canvas for the first time. Six months later, he made his first sale and sent a message to the stranger that would eventually become a close friend.

Since then, doors to the art world have flung themselves open to Devon, who soon made a name for himself by painting and sculpting abstract, geometric forms inspired by Cubism. ​“The phone just started ringing, boom, boom, boom, I was getting phone calls from [people] like Barbara Guggenheim,” he says, shaking his head in slight disbelief. “[At the time], I was asking the guy from the local art shop how to mix paint!”

Now, Devon’s hoping to be the voice on the other end of the phone for the newer artists exhibiting at his show. ​“We have some amazing talent that I just don’t feel like have been given a platform yet to really be seen,” he says.

At the time of SADDLE UP’s conception last year, Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter had just been released and Thorsten Albertz (co-founder of the Albertz Benda gallery), suggested a Cowboy Carter-themed exhibition to Devon. ​“I was like, listen, I love Beyoncé but I’m not putting my name behind a Beyoncé show!” he says, laughing. And so SADDLE UP was born.

The show was initially inspired by an exploration of the ​“mass exodus” towards nature that took place during Covid. In response, artists came back with diverse, touching reflections on the American West. Robert Peterson, an established, self-taught figurative painter from Oklahoma, produced Tough As Nails, a portrait of a young girl leaning over the back of a chair, a white cowboy hat angled over the edge of it. NH Depass, a young artist from New Orleans, is behind It Is Certain, a mixture of painting and carpentry. It’s a noisy painting, full of jostling men in cowboy hats and rolled up shirtsleeves that reveal muscular forearms.

For those of us outside its borders, the American West may feel like an abstract, faraway thing. At best, it’s an amalgamation of images taken from films like Little House on the Prairie or Brokeback Mountain; at worst, it’s a landscape co-opted by the far-right which can serve as shorthand for a spirit of intolerance. But Devon remains optimistic.

“There’s this great quote I read the other day,” he says, opening his notes app. ​“It’s from [Western writer] Wallace Stegner. He says: ​‘One cannot be pessimistic about the West. This is the native home of hope. When it fully learns that cooperation, not rugged individualism, is the quality that most characterises and preserves it, then it will have achieved itself and outlived its origins.’ I think he really nailed it on the head with that.”

SADDLE UP: Artistic Journeys Through Cowboy Culture is on at the Albertz Benda gallery LA until 29^th March