Ten Five in the Grass is an exploration of the Black rodeo circuit in Virginia. 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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Bios
Charles Burnett is an independent filmmaker who was born in Mississippi and raised in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. A key member of the L.A. Rebellion, a generation of Black filmmakers who studied filmmaking at UCLA in the 1960s to 1980s, Burnett has been praised for his portrayal of the African American experience. He wrote, directed, produced, photographed, and edited his first feature film, Killer of Sheep, in 1977. Other features include My Brother’s Wedding, To Sleep with Anger, The Glass Shield, and Namibia: The Struggle for Liberation. Burnett’s documentaries include America Becoming and Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property. His work also includes short films such as The Horse and When it Rains. He received an Academy Honorary Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 2017.
Kevin Jerome Everson is the Commonwealth and Ruffin Foundation Distinguished Professor of Studio Art and Director of Studio Arts at the University of Virginia. He is a recipient of the Guggenheim, Heinz Award in Art and Humanities, Berlin Prize, Alpert Award for Film/Video, Rome Prize, and grants and commissions from the Ford Foundation, Creative Capital, Knight Foundation, Walker Art Center, Sundance Institute, and The Brick. Everson’s practice encompasses photography, printmaking, sculpture and film, with 12 award-winning features and over 300 solo and collaborative short form works that screen regularly at international film festivals, cinemas, galleries, museums and art biennials. His work has been the subject of career retrospectives and solo exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art; Tate Modern/Film, London; Halle fur Kunst Steiermark, Graz, Austria; Centre Pompidou, Paris; and Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul; and was featured in the Whitney Biennial (2008, 2012, 2017), among others.
Leila Weefur is a Liberian American artist, writer, and curator whose work engages with film, architecture, and the archive to examine systems of belonging. Their research, across disciplines, explores environmental geographies, transnationalism, religion, and queer world-making. Weefur has worked with institutions including Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts, International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam, ICASF, the California College of the Arts’ Wattis Institute, SLASH Gallery, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Museum of the African Diaspora, and The Kitchen. Weefur was awarded a MacDowell Fellowship in 2024 and completed a residency with the Bemis Center for the Arts. Their writing has been published in SEEN by BlackStar Productions, Sming Sming Books, Baest Journal, and more. Weefur is an assistant professor of photo/media at the University of Washington and a member of curatorial film collective the Black Aesthetic.
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