Expanding the View

THE AMERICAN West started mythologizing itself even before the “frontier” closed, so it’s hardly surprising that our ideas on the subject are frequently wrong and our images tend to be stereotypes. The classic Western artists focused their attention on the cowboy, the outlaw, and the cavalryman, depicting a uniformly Caucasoid demographic, but the reality is that the average cowboy was as likely to be Black or Latino as white, not to mention the African American horse soldiers who served in the West after the Civil War. As for the Indians, romanticized images dominate, and there is no shortage of demeaning ones, either, not to mention the glorification of conquest and cultural dominance.

The curators at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., wanted to counteract the simplistic and exclusionary narratives and images of the West