Join The Brinton Museum for a special Fall Into Art program presented in support of William Gollings: Collected Treasures.

Michael Grauer will explore the history of working cowboys who became artists, tracing a tradition that developed across the American West long before the founding of the Cowboy Artists of America. His presentation will place William Gollings within a broader story of artists who documented ranching and cowboy life from firsthand experience.

Long before the Cowboy Artists of America was founded in the 1960s and today’s “stampede” of anyone in a Western hat calling themselves a “cowboy artist,” there were, in fact, cowboys who became artists, and some who tried cowboying and became artists. All across the American West, largely toiling in obscurity, drovers and cowhands drew with wagon grease on paper sacks or painted with colors from a mercantile on bits of tarp, attempting to capture the cowboy and ranching way of life that they felt was passing. From Arizona to Montana, from Texas to Oregon, these “pards of the paintbrush” were unified in their calling to “hand down to posterity a bit of unadulterated real thing … muy pronto!” (W. Herbert “Buck” Dunton). This presentation will offer glimpses of this tremendous body of honest depictions of the cowboy way.

The gallery talk will complement William Gollings: Collected Treasures, offering additional context for Gollings’ work and his place within the larger history of artists who recorded the life and culture of the working West.

A ticketed dinner will follow the presentation in The Brinton Bistro. Dinner details and ticket information will be announced soon.