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Museum of Art

The cowboy, like the landscape, has always been a surface onto which America projects its desires. In the 19th-century, as railroads carved paths across the continent and Manifest Destiny reshaped the terrain, so too was identity rewritten—masculinity codified, indigeneity suppressed. This exhibition engages with this Western legacy not through realism, but through rupture: abstraction, iconography, and myth reconfigured.

The works on view span paintings, prints, and sculpture. Colorado-based artist Grace Kennison contorts the visual vocabulary of the West, fusing iconography, femininity, and surreal embodiment into new, parodic forms that explore the landscape as body and the body as a woman. In Twin Becoming & It Hurts, a mountainous, fleshy desert form is held by blue, cloud-like arms—both tender and monstrous figures both human and creature. Louisiana-based artist Jason Byron Nelson renders the cowboy as an anonymous interlude, faceless and confrontational in the dust.

From our permanent collection, Salvador Dalí’s Cabarello distances the Spanish rider from his landscape and reveals the near-mechanical anatomy of the horse, its musculature rendered as gears and panels, its movement more automaton than animal. Dalí exposes the machinery of myth itself: how power is performed, how conquest becomes choreography.

Other works in the display explore landscapes as places of memory and omission. Prints and paintings blur the boundary between ground and sky. Sculptural pieces recall the texture of parchment and bone through materials like clay and handmade paper. Kachina Doll, drawn from our collection, gestures to Pueblo cosmology not as artifact but as an enduring presence, bounded, buried, yet still resonant beneath the myths of the West.

In this exhibition, icon becomes relic, and relic becomes question. If modernity promised clarity, these works resist it.

Image Credit: Grace Kennison, Invisible Bodies, 32″ x 24″, acrylic on canvas

Clifford Tresner attended Indiana State University, Terre Haute, IN, and earned a BFA in Sculpture/Woodworking in 1990. He received his MFA from The University of Mississippi in Oxford in 1994.

Mr. Tresner began his teaching career in earnest in 1997 as an assistant professor of art, tenure track at the University of Louisiana, Monroe, LA, where he taught all levels of sculpture and drawing. Mr. Tresner moved to teaching painting and drawing in 2013. He has held many positions over his career, most recently as the William D. Hammond Endowed Professor of Liberal Arts, 2017 – 2020 and the Art Program Coordinator at the University of Louisiana Monroe.

Supported by a grant from the Louisiana Division of the Arts, Office of Cultural Development, Department of Culture, Recreation and Tourism, in cooperation with the Louisiana State Arts Council, as administered by the Northeast Louisiana Arts Council. Funding has also been provided by the National Endowment for the Arts.