Exhibition Project Draft: Overview and Introduction

Overview:

Walking through the streets of London, it is difficult not to pass a statue of a man on horseback. In art galleries throughout the city, men look out of their portraits from the backs of muscular stallions, the picture of power, regality, and grace. But where are the female riders? Women have long been an integral part of the horse industry in all of its forms, but they are rarely pictured on horses. This exhibition digs deep into the storage units of galleries throughout the city, bringing women and their horses into the spotlight dominated by men. Using a mixture of mediums in both art and literature, “Strong Horses, Strong Women” seeks to show just how powerful and empowering the bond between women and horses can be.

Introduction:  

Many little girls ask Santa Claus for a pony at some point in their childhoods. Running around with a stick horse between their skinny legs, they dream of riding a horse through open fields, jumping over fallen trees and streams. These gentle giants are sources of fascination, as they wistfully gaze out car windows at horses in backyard pastures. 

Horseback riding is now considered a generally feminine pastime, with the number of girls signing up for lessons and summer horse camps greatly dwarfing the minuscule number of boys who swing up into the saddle. But the most common images of horses and their riders are greatly masculinized. Past rulers and military commanders sit on regal stallions with thick, muscular necks and shoulders that betray their virile power, cast in bronze for the world to look upon them for eternity. Simple word association immediately ties horses with cowboys, the hyper masculine men dressed in dirty blue jeans, a Stetson hat, and jangling spurs who can break even the most stubborn horse. Even in the more classically effeminate disciplines, like dressage, the top riders and trainers are men. Women are often demoted into the roles of assistant trainer, if they are able to actually break into the profession, or amateur rider, if they have the money to pay a trainer. The recent creation of lady amateur divisions in many disciplines separate women even further from the male amateurs who might join the sport. Pushed into these categories, the women who do enter into the horse industry in whatever form are plagued with the reduction of their sport into what Tami Spry calls the "facile anthropomorphized Disneyesque romance" between a girl and her horse. 

The relationships between women and horses have often been viewed in a negative light, implying some sort of misplaced psychosexual relationship in the cruder mythologies about women’s relationships with horses. Medieval depictions of women with horses were often those of Amazons or female warriors, those women who existed outside of the typical gender boundaries (Almond). These women are depicted riding astride in the same manner as men to show their sexual otherness. As the study of psychology developed, the vestiges of Freud influenced the view of women and horses. Linda Burke and Keri Brandt explain that “women’s relationships with horses are often submerged within the language of ‘misplacement,’ centered on unfulfilled human desires, such as a desire for a man, or for a child.” But this skewed cultural view ignores and negates the benefits of the woman-horse relationship. This exhibit seeks to showcase and celebrate those benefits.

For the women who ride horses, their experiences generally begin in childhood. As some people joke in the horse industry, little girls are bitten by the ‘horse bug’ and they never turn back. When the girl who ardently asked Santa for a pony finally receives that long awaited gift, or at least riding lessons, they are sent down a road that challenges them and scares their parents. Spry describes those early rides as “the nuanced negotiation of power between an 80-pound girl and 1000-pound horse.” The fact that the horse could run off at any moment, a fear felt by the adults in R.G. Gregory’s poem, “girl (three) and the black horse,” makes the initial rides, or even the initial years of riding, frightening for bystanders. But negotiating such a skewed power dynamic gives the young rider a sense of power and independence that she can control this horse, even if the horse is just kindly tolerating this “fly” on its back. “Miss Elizabeth Williamson” sits confidently on her pony with a self-assured smirk on her face and her hand on her hip in Annie Louisa Swynerton’s painting. The carefree attitude of “little madam” on her pony in the painting points to the cheeky independence she has gained riding through the hills.

The independence given to a young girl on a pony transforms into the power held by women riders captured in the rest of the exhibit. Horses represent power and the way women ride them affords them that same power. For that reason, writers like May Swenson and Virginia Woolf imagine women with the strength of horses, clearing obstacles and “lengthening out for the test” with “aloofness in their limbs.” Women exert their power from horseback, resisting suitors, leading foxhunts, and riding the powerful stallions normally reserved for men. The final image of Queen Victoria on a rearing horse is shown with a saddle purportedly owned by Queen Elizabeth I, showing that horseback riding was used to display the power of female rulers in the same manner as male rulers.

Riding often is placed into the category of a hobby, a phase, something to be grown out of. This exhibit is meant to show that riding is so much than that; it is a means to fly without leaving to ground, to create an unbreakable bond with an animal, and to find power on the back of a horse.