The Black Cowboy Experience

The Black Cowboy Experience
Event overview and curated menu
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 5, 2026 | 6:00–10:00 PM
Brent Holmes × Chef Natalie Young / Echo Taste & Sound
Curated and produced by The Process Studio

An evening of art, storytelling, music, and food shaped around Brent Holmes’s Jones Ranch Egypt body of work. The curated menu will accompany the work as a culinary interpretation of its histories, characters, codes, appetites, and contradictions. The experience invites guests into the world of Afro-Westernism through the senses, with the art and conversation unfolding together across the evening.
The artistic frame
Painter and multidisciplinary artist Brent Holmes approaches the mythology of the American West through Afro-Westernism, bringing Black histories of ranching, labor, ancestry, and resilience into a landscape long shaped by the legend of the cowboy. In Jones Ranch Egypt, the West moves between Egypt, Texas, where Holmes’s roots meet a history of ranching, and Las Vegas, a city of spectacle, appetite, vice, and spiritual possibility. Drawing on African mask traditions, iconography, ritual, ceremony, and the codes of the Western, Holmes gathers a cast of spirits and entities into a mythology that is ancestral and contemporary, sacred and profane.
The Cowboy Code provides a moral spine for the work. Holmes revisits Gene Autry’s Cowboy Code and creates a larger symbolic world around justice, truth, restraint, care, labor, respect, and the possibility of a utopian West.
The evening
Arrival Guests encounter the artwork, food, and music before the stories are fully introduced.
Welcome and conversation Nicole Holt introduces Jones Ranch Egypt and Afro-Westernism, followed by a brief conversation with Brent about the Black cowboy, the work’s entities, and the Cowboy Code.
Culinary storytelling Selected artworks or entities become chapters in an ongoing conversation. Brent shares their character and meaning; Natalie connects the menu to the work through taste, m