Beyoncé Is on a Horse Again

Beyoncé shared the cover image of her forthcoming album, act ii: COWBOY CARTER, on Instagram yesterday.

In the image, she wears a rodeo-ready red, white, and blue outfit paired with a white ten-gallon hat. She sits side-saddle on a white horse while holding an American flag.

Shot by Los Angeles photographer Blair Caldwell, the image embodies the singer’s effortful move away from R & B towards country music.

‘I feel honoured to be the first Black woman with the number one single on the Hot Country Songs chart,’ she wrote on Instagram. Her track ‘Texas Hold ‘Em’ has topped the chart for the past five weeks.

‘My hope is that years from now, the mention of an artist’s race, as it relates to releasing genres of music, will be irrelevant,’ she said.

Artnet News compared the cover image to Jacques-Louis David’s hagiographic Napoleon Crossing the Alps (1801–05) and Marina Abramović‘s The Hero (2001). The Guardian likened it to Kehinde Wiley‘s painting Equestrian Portrait of King Philip II (Michael Jackson) (2010).

The horse and rider is indeed a common art historical trope, and one that Beyoncé has embraced before.

For the cover of her 2022 album Renaissance, Beyoncé sat near-naked on a holographic horse. GQ, Art News, InStyle, Glamour, Numèro, and The Sun all compared the cover to John Collier’s Godiva (c. 1898), which resides at the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum in Coventry.

‘Collier shows Godiva as a real person, a very young woman who seems shy and possibly even ashamed at what she is being forced to do,’ the Curatorial Manager at the Herbert, Martin Roberts, told Ocula at the time.

In contrast, Beyoncé sits confidently on her holographic horse, her body turned squarely towards the camera of Dutch photographer Carlijn Jacobs.

Towards the end of her Instagram post Beyoncé writes, ‘This ain’t a Country album. This is a “Beyoncé” album.’

Similarly, the cover art for act ii: COWBOY CARTER ain’t a renaissance painting or a conceptual artwork. It’s a Beyoncé album cover. —[O]

Main image: Courtesy Beyoncé's Instagram.