Artist Gina Teichert takes us through her experience at the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering, where kismet and homecoming converge.
Dinner service at the Star Hotel has ended. Family-style spreads of spaghetti, chorizos, cabbage soup, beans, and garlic-smothered steaks have been cleared. Tables and chairs are stacked in the corners of the modest dining room. Concertgoers flow into every remaining space. From the back of the room, you look over a sea of cowboy hats — a few with feathers and ribbons, many with real dirt and real sweat. There is no stage, but if you turn your attention to the same corner as everyone else, you might catch a glimpse of a familiar face or a lick of a favorite song.
People have climbed the stacks of furniture — a precarious but effective perch if you’re here for the music and not just the scene. I grab my friend’s teen daughter and muscle our way to the front. My definitely-not-a-fangirl husband trails a few feet behind. We arrive at what I’ll call stage right, a space between the kitchen door and the performers. Mike Beck, Colter Wall, and Gail Steiger are seated beneath a low-hanging light fixture where a dining table once stood. The wall above is filled with carved wooden tchotchkes from the old country and a sign that reads, “Eat, drink & be Basque!”
A rowdy, underground music fest taking place the same week, The Outside Circle Show entertained a sardine packed house at local Basque dinnerhouse the Star Hotel.
We’re at the Outside Circle Show in Elko, Nevada, a concert billed as “organized chaos at its finest.” If you ask anyone from the local fire department, they’ll probably agree. The previous night, revelers reveled on past 5:00 am. Celebrating its 10th year, the rowdy DIY music fest started as a free counterpoint to the pricey ticketed shows at the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering, a concurrent event that’s been bringing folks to northeastern Nevada every winter since 1985.
I’m back in town for poetry week, mounting a show of my paintings at the Cowboy Arts and Gear Museum and turning out free portraits for festivalgoers as the museum’s artist-in-residence. I say back because I grew up here, or more specifically, in a small ranching community at the foot of the Ruby Mountains. The population of Elko County has hovered around 50,000 for as long as I can remember, but at twice the size of New Jersey, that comes out to three people per square mile. For most of us, going to Elko is going to town.
Cowboy poetry week is Elko at its most stylish — dandy ranch hands driving 50 miles to unload hard-won wages and “dudes,” as my dad would call them, traveling from far corners to take in the show. The gamut of Western attire is as wide as the Great Basin, and I find myself recruiting models at breakfast, at the bar, and on the street. The idea is to paint as many portraits as I can during the residency — a project that will become a collective portrait of the festival itself.
On Friday Feb 2, the Cowboy Arts and Gear Museum held an opening reception for Cowboyology and a concurrent show of handmade bits, spurs, and reins. Culminating that night, an auction of work by the spur, bit, and rawhide makers grossed over $100,000 (PHOTOGRAPHY: Courtesy Gina Teichert).
I set up shop in the museum, the historic storefront of G.S. Garcia, a turn-of-the-century gear maker famous for bits and spurs. I park my easel next to a fiberglass horse in a parade saddle and commandeer for my sitters an outsize cow horn chair dubbed “the throne.” Buckaroo, bartender, silversmith, stay-at-home mom. Kids, teens, grandparents and a dog. A true cross-section of humanity queue up for their turn in the hot seat.
I paint them for three days straight without breaking for lunch. An angel brings me an Irish coffee in a to-go cup. A TV crew shoots something for the local news. My sisters and nieces and nephews and old high school friends come and go and I paint on. For a moment I fear I’m missing the gathering, but in a string of beautiful happenings, I realize the gathering is coming to me.
Cowboy Crossroads host Andy Hedges pulls out his guitar and plays a few songs while I paint his daughter, Maggie Rose. His son grabs a sketchbook and draws on the floor. Kent Reeves, a poet, photographer, regenerative ag enthusiast, and all-around renaissance man offers up his poems from the throne. Cutting it close for an afternoon performance, Oregon poet Annie Mackenzie swaps a few verses for someone’s spot in the line. In cowboy poetry country, that’s a fair trade.
With support from Travel Nevada, I painted free portraits of festival goers and sent each sitter home with their piece. Project participants were asked to think of a word that meant something to them — an adjective, a nickname, an inside joke. At the end of the festival, the portraits and text will then turn become a poem and a collective portrait of the cowboy poetry community.
In addition to loaning their faces, each sitter contributes their own word or phrase for the painting — personal monikers, inside jokes, adjectives silly and serious, and unfortunately, very few verbs. I write a poem using their inputs, and those words alone. Rhyme-loving cowboy poets might call it blasphemy, but generously, I’ll call it free verse. Cowboyology — the name of the poem and the show — is a hat tip to my double life in visual and language arts and an ode to the cowboy lexicon. My grandfather performed at the gathering in 1987. And in grade school, I hopped up on stage and recited a bit of my own. For a fourth grade poet turned painter, Cowboyology isn’t half bad.
To celebrate my final day of painting and my last night in town, I brave the Outside Circle madness. Tired, I justify just a couple of drinks. The crowd is full of wonderful faces — people I grew up with, people I just met. Faces I know well because I painted them. Faces I’d still like to paint. In the green room, someone who posed a few days earlier pulls me aside to sign a poster — a pinup cowgirl I painted for the Outside Circle Show. The poster raised a few eyebrows, fodder for wise guys who wanted to know exactly what kind of portraits I’d be painting this week.
Back inside the dining room, we meet a man named Fernando. His relatives lived upstairs at the Star back when it, like most Basque joints, was a boarding house too. I see pride sweep over his face as the guys start playing. We’re 10 feet away from Western icons in our humble hometown spot, and I can’t help but feel a little proud too. The room is restless and catcalling, but despite the chaos (as advertised), their set is strong. Beck plays John Prine. Wall plays Beck. Steiger leads a singalong of "Sierry Petes," his grandfather's seminal work.
Well known acts like Gail Steiger, Colter Wall and Mike Beck joined underknown poets and singer songwriters in a folk music free for all that rattled the sleepy town until 5:00 am.
As soon as their set is up, a towering Texan ushers the next performers through the crowd. Shandee Layne, a cherub-faced singer from Oklahoma, rips our hearts out with her song "Cryin’ Wolf." Caitlyn Taussig’s murder ballads chill. Brennan Scott Greene plays boot-stomping licks with a side of didgeridoo. Tyler Jackson, a cowboy working on Tuscarora’s YP ranch, and Jade Brodie, a railroader turned ranch hand from Winnemucca, stoke the local pride. Real cowboys and cool kids with new Stetsons are all dancing and laughing and raging in the sage.
The night gets away from me, and I realize I stayed for more than just a couple of drinks. When you talk to cowboy poetry supporters, they say this is what it’s all about — the kismet and chemistry of coming together and keeping the tradition alive for the next generation. I was that generation in a hazy, but not-so-distant past.
We say our goodbyes and make our way to the door, spilling out into the glow of half-working neon and freshly fallen snow. Leaving the show before curtain call, I see teens and twenty-somethings still giggling and enjoying a night out on their town. I see myself 20 years ago. And I see the torch has already been passed.
Part of my Cowboyology portrait project as artist in residence at the Cowboy Arts & Gear Museum in Elko, Nevada, during the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering (PHOTOGRAPHY: Courtesy Gina Teichert).
Watch Cowboyology by Gina Tierchert
Check out Gina Teichert and her artwork.
Learn more about the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering.
HEADER IMAGE: Courtesy Kent Reeves
