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Humanities Texas is pleased to introduce Soul Circuit: Juneteenth Rodeos in Texas, a new traveling exhibition featuring recently published photographs by writer Sarah Bird of small-town Black rodeos. In the late 1970s, a time when rodeo competitors with ranch backgrounds were more the rule than the exception, Black communities throughout Texas organized local rodeos for cowboys and cowgirls outside of the mainstream, white-sponsored circuits. Known as the "Soul Circuit," this thriving network of small-town rodeos played a crucial role in perpetuating and sustaining the more than two-hundred-year lineage of Black cowboys in America. These jubilant occasions, particularly Juneteenth rodeos, celebrated fellowship, community, and victories both in and out of the arena.

Soul Circuit: Juneteenth Rodeos in Texas features forty-three dynamic black-and-white photographs that take viewers along the full morning-to-late-night arc that constituted a Juneteenth rodeo. Last summer, these images were displayed at Austin’s Neill-Cochran House Museum in conjunction with the publication of Bird’s book, Juneteenth Rodeo, which Smithsonian Magazine named one of the best photography books of 2024. Humanities Texas then adapted the exhibition for travel, and, in January, Soul Circuit made its inaugural appearance at the Nia Cultural Center in Galveston.

The exhibition has received a wonderful response so far. On February 8, Bird gave a presentation at the Nia alongside Demetrius W. Pearson, author of Black Rodeo in the Texas Gulf Region: Charcoal in the Ashes, and Harold Cash, a Black rodeo champion and 2010 inductee to the National Multicultural Western Heritage Museum’s Hall of Fame.

Soul Circuit: Juneteenth Rodeos in Texas is now available through the Humanities Texas traveling exhibitions program. To learn more about reserving this wall-hanging exhibition for your venue, please email exhibitions@humanitiestexas.org.