Ten Five in the Grass: Kevin Jerome Everson in Conversation with Leila Weefur

Ten Five in the Grass is an exploration of the Black rodeo circuit in the South. Through a blend of documentary realism and poetic imagery, Kevin Jerome Everson captures the grit, skill, and community spirit that define this vibrant subculture. His camera lingers on the ritualistic preparations of riders adjusting stirrups, steadying horses, and transforming mundane gestures into choreographed movements that speak to generations of expertise. The film builds meaning through duration and repetition, as dust clouds rise from arena dirt, metallic gates clang, and bodies move against landscape. Everson allows the physicality of the sport to articulate its own significance, revealing how this familial tradition reclaims Western iconography through embodied knowledge and collective memory. 2011, US, digital, 32 min.

The film is preceded by Charles Burnett’s The Horse (1973). A delicate picture of the complex bond between a young Black boy and an ailing horse in the rural American South, Burnett’s short film is a sociopolitical reminder of the inevitability of death and its threat of imminence in Black life. 1973, US, digital, 13 min.

A conversation with artist and filmmaker Kevin Jerome Everson and series curator Leila Weefur follows the program.

Ten Five in the Grass appears courtesy the artist, trilobite-arts DAC, and Picture Palace Pictures.

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