jeremiah ariaz

Jeremiah Ariaz’s artworks explore the West as both a physical space and a terrain for the imagination. With photographic exhibitions Ariaz brings scrutiny to popular representations while revealing alternative narratives that have been under-represented in history.

Ariaz grew up in Great Bend, Kansas, a rural town in the center of the country. This upbringing on the Great Plains, said to be “where the west begins”, profoundly affected his artistic practice. His work investigates Manifest Destiny as a central theme and seeks to understand how and why the mythology of the American West still provides a central narrative to the Unites States. In 2014 he began a project titled, “Louisiana Trail Riders” documenting Creole trail riding clubs in southwest Louisiana. Black trail-riding clubs have their roots in Creole culture which formed in South Louisiana in the eighteenth century. The riders form a distinctive yet little-known subculture, one that exists in stark contrast to most depictions of cowboys and serves as a reminder that Black equestrian culture stems from a time when the Louisiana Territory was in fact the American West. These photographs share an important aspect of Louisiana’s cultural heritage and assert a counternarrative to the limited depictions of Black life in popular culture.

Ariaz was named the 2018 Louisiana State Fellow and awarded the 2018 Southern Arts Finalist Prize from South Arts. He was also the recipient of the 2018 Michael P. Smith Award for Documentary Photography from the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, a Community Partnership Grant from the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Foundation, and an ATLAS grant. A monograph of the work titled, “Louisiana Trail Riders” was released in 2018 from UL Press and has been featured in the Paris Review, U.S. News and World Report, Oxford American, among others. Louisiana Trail Riders bridges Ariaz’s long-standing interest in the American West and his current home in the South where he is a Professor at Louisiana State University.

More of his work can be found at his personal websites: www.JeremiahAriaz.com & www.LouisianaTrailRiders.com