The Black Cowboy Experience
Event Overview and Curated Menu
Thursday, November 5, 2026, 6:00–10:00 PM
Brent Holmes × Chef Natalie Young / Echo Taste & Sound
Curated and produced by The Process Studio
An evening of art, storytelling, music, and food shaped around Brent Holmes’s Jones Ranch Egypt body of work. The curated menu will accompany the work as a culinary interpretation of its histories, characters, codes, appetites, and contradictions. The experience invites guests into the world of Afro-Westernism through the senses, with the art and conversation unfolding together across the evening.
Links: Echo Taste & Sound 
The Process Studio
The artistic frame
Painter and multidisciplinary artist Brent Holmes approaches the mythology of the American West through Afro-Westernism, bringing Black histories of ranching, labor, ancestry, and resilience into a landscape long shaped by the legend of the cowboy. In Jones Ranch Egypt, the West moves between Egypt, Texas, where Holmes’s roots meet a history of ranching, and Las Vegas, a city of spectacle, appetite, vice, and spiritual possibility. Drawing on African mask traditions, iconography, ritual, ceremony, and the codes of the Western, Holmes gathers a cast of spirits and entities into a mythology that is ancestral and contemporary, sacred and profane.
The Cowboy Code provides a moral spine for the work. Holmes revisits Gene Autry’s Cowboy Code and creates a larger symbolic world around justice, truth, restraint, care, labor, respect, and the possibility of a utopian West.
The evening
Arrival Guests encounter the artwork, food, and music before the stories are fully introduced.
Welcome and conversation Nicole Holt introduces Jones Ranch Egypt and Afro-Westernism, followed by a brief conversation with Brent about the Black cowboy, the work’s entities, and the Cowboy Code.
Culinary storytelling Selected artworks or entities become chapters in an ongoing conversation. Brent shares their character and meaning; Natalie connects the menu to the work through taste, memory, texture, indulgence, restraint, or transformation.
Music and release Music and conversation build through the night, opening into a more social atmosphere with continued art viewing and conversation.
Jones Ranch Egypt stories
The work includes ten named entities, each connected to a Cowboy Code principle. These concise notes can guide the menu pairing conversation; the dishes are not assigned to specific entities here.
The Magician Fairness and mastery; the figure holds his pistol upside down, with a Joshua tree at a crossroads.
The Hanged Woman Keeping one’s word and protecting trust; a figure suspended among blackberry briars, where sweetness and thorns meet.
The Devil Truth as a loving act of distribution; an antelope spirit and the upheaval of admitting what is true.
The Tower Gentleness toward children, elders, and animals; a rodeo image set against the implosion of the Sands.
The High Priest Rejecting racial and religious intolerance; a contemplative figure holding multiple viewpoints.
Justice Helping people in distress; ancestral purity, protection, beauty, danger, and spiritual transformation.
The Miniski Being a good worker; a community power figure, upright horseshoe, luck, and the social meaning of tobacco.
Rope Stars Clean thought, speech, action, and habits; lasso, stars, and the relationship between heaven and earth.
The Prickly Pear Emperor Respect for women, parents, and the law; discipline and restraint rendered as a thorny struggle.
El Mundo The Cowboy is a Utopian; initiation, regality, love, rejuvenation, and the need for vision and clarity.
Chef Natalie Young’s curated menu
CHUCK WAGON
Charcuterie board — Fried okra, pickled okra, head cheese, saltine crackers, mushroom jerky, beef jerky, mini garlic drop biscuits, andouille sausage
Artichoke collard green dip — Toasted baguette
Deviled eggs — Classic, pickled jalapeño, and smoked paprika
Smoked trout corncake — Chives, horseradish crema, apple sauce, and frisée salad
Fried catfish bites — Remoulade?
Peach trail cobbler
Beignets
Handwritten additions on the supplied menu to confirm with Chef Natalie
• Ham hock (written beside the catfish entry; placement unclear)
• Gumbo / rice / beans / shrimp (confirm whether this is one gumbo dish with accompaniments)
• Cowboy coffee
Links
Presentation and credits
The menu is presented as a culinary interpretation paired with the Jones Ranch Egypt body of work. A smaller number of entities may be developed as featured story moments during service, with the final dish-to-art pairings shaped collaboratively by Brent, Natalie, and Nicole.
THE BLACK COWBOY
A Jones Ranch Egypt Experience
Brent Holmes × Chef Natalie Young / Echo Taste & Sound
Curated and produced by The Process Stu
