Everybody’s Bolos

Thirty artists explore craft, agency and gender through the bolo tie!

Everybody’s Bolos features creations by 30 contemporary artists exploring craft, agency and gender through bolo ties. The exhibition is co-curated by metalsmith Hannah Reynoso Toussaint; metalsmith, educator and decorative arts scholar Ana M. Lopez; and jeweler, educator and curator Brian Fleetwood (Muscogee Creek Nation).

After touring to the University of North Texas Gallery and The Fuller Craft Museum, the group show lands at Hecho a Mano.

Toussaint was inspired to pursue a project on bolos after making one for her partner, who had recently come out as nonbinary. “They were really comfortable and affirmed wearing it, so I wanted to look at bolos through a wider queer lens and as a way to express genderless adornment,” Toussaint (who uses she/they pronouns) says. She approached her professor, Ana M. Lopez, about creating a series of bolo ties.

In their subsequent research, both Toussaint and Lopez encountered a dearth of information on the ornament’s history, and even less about its place in queer and nonbinary communities. Together with Brian Fleetwood, Toussaint and Lopez set out to change this. Toussaint delved into their own family history and Mexican heritage, as well as the broader history of the bolo as an accessory of the first vaqueros and the rich history of queerness throughout the Southwest and western migration through the US. “Digging up queer stories of the West, especially trans and gender nonconforming stories, was such a wonderful surprise,” Toussaint says, noting that this history subverts the narrative that being trans or nonbinary is a new concept: “A lot of queer history is erased when people in power decide to not write it down or explicitly leave it out.”