OKLAHOMA CITY (KFOR) — Comfortably wearing a black Stetson, a short duster, and roper heels, Jakian Parks can still remember getting his first pair of cowboy boots.
He recalls feeling like, “I have arrived,” he smiles. “I still have those boots, actually.”
He can remember begging his aunt to take him to rodeos, too.
“This is when I was younger,” he continues, “I just wanted to be out there, and I just wanted to ride.”
Skip ahead a couple of decades, and he is surrounded by images that reflect a unique Oklahoma upbringing.
“I would say this is like a homecoming for me,” he admits.
Parks and creative partner Chloe Flowers pored through years of photographs taken when Jakian first started documenting ‘black rodeos’ and a community where the pride of land ownership, horsemanship, worship, even cow chips come together in quiet but powerful ways.
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Foster states, “He has a vision. He has an idea. He gives it to me and my job is to make it happen.”
Curators at Oklahoma Contemporary saw the importance of these images as well.
“They interconnect what is, very much, a historic part of our state’s long, black history and to the modern, Oklahoma, black cowboy,” argues Executive Director Trent Riley.
‘The Black Land: Rituals and Rejoicing’ reflects a kind of self-determination, a claiming of space, that inspired the storyteller in Foster, Parks’ longtime friend, who helped choose photographs taken on a ranch in Jones, OK, a church in Arcadia, OK, and the annual Boley, OK Rodeo.
“When it comes to selecting the images,” she insists, “I really think about what he first told me about the project, and what he wanted it to mean and what he wanted it to say.”
Explaining them, putting words and background stories to the photographs in the exhibit opens windows, barn doors, and rodeo gates to places in Oklahoma where The West lives in a different shade, but with a determination all its own.
For more information on ‘The Black Land’ exhibit, click here.
For more information on the work of Jakian Parks, click here.
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