Jeremiah Ariaz
Louisiana Trail Riders
August 6 - 27, 2022
Blue Sky is pleased to announce Louisiana Trail Riders, an exhibition of photographs by Jeremiah Ariaz.
Black trail-riding clubs have their roots in Creole culture which formed in South Louisiana in the eighteenth century. Today trail rides are an opportunity for generations of people to gather, celebrate, and ride horseback. The riders form a distinctive yet little-known subculture in Southwest Louisiana, one that exists in stark contrast to most depictions of cowboys and serves as a reminder that Black equestrian culture stems from a time when the Louisiana Territory was in fact the American West.
These photographs share an important aspect of Louisiana’s cultural heritage and assert a counternarrative to the limited depictions of Black life in popular culture. Ariaz’s project began around the fiftieth anniversary of many of the achievements of the civil rights era, as well as in the wake of Trayvon Martin’s death, when violence and indifference to the value of young Black lives was brought to the national spotlight in incidents across the country, from Ferguson, MO to Baton Rouge, following the tragic death of Alton Sterling in 2016. In the context of this national backdrop, the photographs depict joy, pride, and familial intimacy, particularly between fathers and sons, who are taught to care for and ride horses from an early age. Louisiana Trail Riders reflects contemporary Creole culture and the celebratory spirit of the rides while sharing one of the many histories in the American story that has largely remained untold.
In-Person Artist Talk, Saturday, August 6
Jeremiah Ariaz (He/Him)(American, b. 1976) works explore the West as both a physical space and a terrain for the imagination. He received his BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute and MFA from the State University of New York at Buffalo. Through long-term documentary-style projects, Ariaz brings scrutiny to popular representations of the American West while revealing alternative narratives that have been under-represented in history.
Ariaz has garnered critical acclaim for Louisiana Trail Riders, a four-year project documenting Black trail-riding clubs that have their roots in Creole culture formed in South Louisiana in the eighteenth century. For this work he was the recipient of an ATLAS grant, the Michael P. Smith Award for Documentary Photography from the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, a Community Partnership Grant from the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Foundation, the Southern Arts Finalist Prize from South Arts, as well as being named the 2018 Louisiana State Fellow. The photographs have been featured in solo exhibitions at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University in Durham, NC, Acadiana Center for the Arts in Lafayette, LA, Zeitgeist Gallery in Nashville, TN, Artspace in Shreveport, LA, Columbus State University in Columbus, GA, Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art in Manhattan, KS, as well as in group exhibitions nationally.
A monograph of the work, Louisiana Trail Riders was released in 2018 by UL Press. The book has been featured in the Paris Review, U.S. News and World Report, Oxford American, among others. Louisiana Trail Riders bridges Ariaz’s long-standing interest in the American West and his current home in the South where he is a Professor at Louisiana State University.