MAROON MUSINGS

BY JOSEPH KRZYSTON ’19

It’s easy for some interesting facets of the Roanoke College landscape to go unnoticed by students. A good number pass their time totally unaware of the stories behind the school’s most fascinating features.

One such feature is a large image that hangs in Commons, in the main room just off the Colket Center atrium. It shows a cowgirl on a horse, striking a pose that seems to defy the laws of motion.

So much about the artwork is hard to place. The photorealistic quality of the image, for one, was a topic of debate during my years as a student. Was it a painting or a colorized photo? Also discussed and dissected was the look of sanguine cheerfulness on the cowgirl’s face. Further confusing things: There’s nothing else like it in the general vicinity. It’s not a western-themed wall, or even part of a greater display. It hangs alone, in a corner in the dining hall, and nobody seemed to know why.

“Cowgirl Ann,” as she is known, could be something of a divisive figure. Some students loved her, including her in the eclectic canon of Roanoke College art and appreciating the attributes that others found vexing. To another, larger, group of students, the perceived randomness of the portrait was difficult to warm up to. There’s an aesthetic sensibility shared widely by my generation, and unfortunately it doesn’t make a lot of room for an out-of-place cowgirl.

For what it’s worth, I was always fond of Cowgirl Ann. With or without context, the image is striking.

The colors stir together in an otherworldly way. There’s a low relief between the colors in her clothes and the browns of the background, and altogether, the palate is muted in a way that doesn’t really happen in the natural world. In the center of this, her facial expression and physical poise call to mind an optimism in the face of featureless surroundings and uncertain prospects.

To my mind, Cowgirl Ann stands as a figure of defiant humanity on a barren plane. One gets the feeling that this woman on her horse could do anything, and that she’d make it all look easy.

I’ll admit to having passed my college career in ignorance to the Cowgirl Ann’s background. As happens so disappointingly often, I was unfamiliar with her creator, Bob “Daddy-O” Wade, until his passing last year on Christmas Eve. Based in Austin, Texas, Wade was best known for his sculptures, which participated in the great tradition of largerthan-life roadside Americana.

A seminal figure in the Texas Cosmic Cowboy counterculture of the 1970s, he is best remembered for pieces such as his 12-foot iguana, originally on the roof of New York City’s Lone Star Café, or for the giant cowboy boots that today reside in San Antonio and have become a landmark. Wade understood better than anyone the distinct characteristics of American kitsch, and he made art that was striking, unique, and very accessible.

Less widely known were Wade’s hand-tinted versions of photos from the American West. Among his favorite subjects were cowgirls, and Cowgirl Ann — which Wade was commissioned to create — is among them. Wade dedicated his book of these images, “Cowgirls,” to “people everywhere who continue to embrace the cowgirl spirit.”

As an East Coast native, I can’t claim to know the cowgirl spirit quite as well as Wade, a native Texan, did, but I can hazard a guess as to some of what it entailed: an embrace of freedom, an appreciation for wide open spaces, and a vigorous, upbeat approach to life.

These are among the qualities that run through Wade’s work, and we can see them clearly in Cowgirl Ann, who few may know was Ann Weinstein, a Roanoke artist, art critic and member of the College’s Art Advisory Council. She and husband Sidney Weinstein ’42, commissioned and generously gifted sculptor Alice Aycock’s “The Solar Wind,” a sculpture that stands at the entrance to the Science Complex.

Naysayers aside, we are fortunate to have Cowgirl Ann as a guest in our dining hall, embodying our best traits and encouraging us to imagine a world as wide open as hers and Wade’s. RC

Joseph Krzyston ’19 majored in Environmental Studies at Roanoke and currently works in marketing in central North Carolina.