David B. Smith Gallery is proud to present Last Year’s Wonders All Surpassed, a collaborative exhibition by Yumi Janairo Roth and Emmanuel David. The exhibition, whose title is drawn from the advertising phrases of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, examines the place of the Filipino cowboy on the world stage.

 

Last Year’s Wonders All Surpassed reimagines histories of the American West through the lens of U.S.-Philippine relations. In 1898 the United States defeated Spain in the Spanish American War, gaining the Philippines as a colony. The following year, in the shadow of the newly declared Philippine American War, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West hired three Filipinos to perform as part of the show’s Congress of Rough Riders of the World. It is with this historical backdrop that Roth and David have been exploring the long-forgotten stories of Filipinos in Wild West shows and contemporary cowboy culture in the Philippines.

 

The show features new work, including 11,111, a series of over 130 paintings and a two-channel video that tracks the miles traversed by a trio of Filipino Rough Riders as they performed on tour with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West in 1899. Produced collaboratively with jeepney sign painters in metro Manila, these vibrantly colored paintings are shown alongside contemporary portraits of participants in the Rodeo Masbateño, an annual festival in the Philippines that showcases the long history of the livestock industry and its related cowboy culture across the island nation.