Western Cowboy Reloaded: Artist Panel & Conversation

Join us to celebrate the artists inside the exhibit. This moderated artist panel brings together a group of contemporary photographers whose work challenges, expands, and reframes traditional narratives of cowboy and rodeo culture. Through image, story, and lived experience, these artists explore what it means to belong to the West today, and who gets to define it.

Presented in partnership with Colorado Photogrpahic Arts Center and Mad Agriculture, this conversation reflects the organization’s broader approach to media, using storytelling as a bridge between land, culture, and community. Facilitated by Jonnah Perkins, Mad Agriculture Media Director, the panel is grounded in a belief that visual and narrative work can deepen our understanding of working landscapes and the people who shape them.

• Ian Warren
• Jack Ludlam
• Rob Hammer

Additional exhibiting artists include Juan Fuentes, Constance Jaeggi, and Amanda Lopez.

This conversation will move beyond nostalgia and myth, offering a more complex and inclusive vision of the West, one shaped by working lands, cultural memory, and emerging voices.

Topics will include:

• Reinterpreting cowboy and rodeo culture through contemporary lenses
• Expanding representation in Western visual narratives
• The relationship between land, labor, and identity
• Photography as a tool for cultural and land-based storytelling

The panel will conclude with an audience Q&A, inviting dialogue and reflection.

brings together six photographers whose work reflects a shifting cultural landscape. With perspectives spanning Mexican American identity, contemporary ranch life, and the evolving iconography of the cowboy, the exhibition challenges long-held assumptions and opens space for new narratives to emerge. The exhibition runs May 8-June20

Mad Agriculture will be present throughout the weekend with copies of the Mad Agriculture Journal, featuring the work of Ian Warren. His photography explores the relationship between land, labor, and culture in the American West, extending the exhibition’s themes into editorial storytelling.

The Land Library will also be on site with a curated selection of historical Western texts, offering a literary counterpoint to the exhibition and grounding contemporary perspectives in the region’s deeper cultural archive.

May 8th between 5 – 8 pm

MAD AGRICULTURE is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit working from heart to head, poetry to science, financing to markets, and soil to shelf. We meet farmers wherever they are on their journey toward regenerative agriculture.

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