Ayana V Jackson's solo exhibition at the Arles Gallery showcases three projects: You Forgot to See Me Coming, Hidden in Plain Sight and Intimate Justice. Through what she calls 'equestrian embodiment', Jackson celebrates great horsewomen who galloped through prejudice.
Honouring historic horsewomen
In You Forgot to See Me Coming, Jackson explores the lives of historic black and mestiza horsewomen such as Mary Fields and Selika Lazevski, who pushed against racial prejudice. One photograph shows Jackson riding sidesaddle with her eyes closed, a tribute to Lazevski, a celebrated black equestrian from belle époque Paris.
Another image, The Good News Is Not Delivered from Mountaintops But in Clearings (2026), draws its title from Shatema Threadcraft's book Labors of Resurrection: Black Women, Necromancy and Morrisonian Democracy. 'The characters I inhabit,' says Jackson, 'both real and imagined, carry the defiance and determined perseverance that, given the realities of their time, left them little choice than to seek freedom in fugitivity and truancy. More often than not, their work is carried on in secrecy. Yet from time to time, we find them bathed in the clarifying moonlight of a clearing.'
Challenging racial and gender norms
Amelio Robles: In the End He Was Buried in a Dress to Make Peace With God (2025) depicts Amelio Robles, born Carmen Robles, an Afro-mestizo colonel who fought in the Zapatista army during the Mexican revolution and lived publicly as a man. Through 'equestrian embodiment', Jackson confronts and subverts racist and sexist narratives embedded in dominant historical imagery.
Mary Fields, known as Stage Coach Mary, was the first African-American female mail carrier for what became the postal service. In With a Jug of Whiskey By Her Foot, a Pistol Packed Under Her Apron, and a Shotgun By Her Side (2023), Jackson embodies Fields, bent forward and gazing toward the horizon. Fields' achievements were not formally recognised until the 2000s.
Retrieving forgotten narratives
Adelitas were women, often indigenous or Afro-Mexican, whose clandestine participation in the Mexican revolution was crucial. Jackson embodies an adelita in Adelita: She Was Not Only Brave She Was Beautiful (2023), and in Adelita: I Would Follow Her By Ground and Sea (2023), she says: 'I work from archives to retrieve those narratives most often left out of the frame, retelling stories like those of black and mestiza women bearing weapons or in a battle.'
You Forgot to See Me Coming is a play on words referencing the impact of forgotten histories on contemporary ways of seeing one another. It is a way of saying, 'If you hadn't reduced me to this phenotype, to this skin colour, or to this gender, you would have been able to see the power harboured in my blood and my legacy.'
Hidden in Plain Sight and Intimate Justice
American Simulacrum (2026) is from Jackson's latest series, Hidden in Plain Sight, which examines the histories of real individuals, particularly extraordinary women, and uses 'critical fabulation' to bring the past to life. A Truant Practice in Fugitive Time I (2026) depicts the equestrian figure as both historic and symbolic. In Al-Andalus, Muslim-owned territory on what is now modern-day Spain and Portugal, trade brought together north African and Iberian traditions of horsemanship. These customs were taken by Spanish colonisation to the Americas, where they were transformed by Indigenous and Afro-descendent influences, giving rise to the tradition of charrería in Mexico.
In Hidden in Plain Sight I (2026), Jackson embodies a character wearing a leather garment intricately tooled by the charrería workshop Artesanías Mexicanas Lalo in Mexico City. The garment brings together indigenous American symbolism with African iconographies.
Wild Like the Wind (2015) is from the series Intimate Justice, in which Jackson imagined scenes that were never recorded: black women in moments of rest, introspection and quiet presence. Labouring Under the Sign of the Future (2017) concentrates on showing interiority and self-possession, as a riposte to the historical absence or erasure of such images. Researcher Jumko Ogata-Aguilar writes: 'Black women's bodies have historically been burdened – both literally and discursively. The violence of slavery turned these women into pack animals, while simultaneously imposing violent ideas on every part of their bodies – size, colour, hair – leaving a notion of black femininity that is difficult to confront.'
