Useful Aesthetics

Text by Domenic Toliver with Ivan McClellan

“Nobody asked me to build a rodeo. It was just the most useful thing I could think of.”  - Ivan McClellan

Lately, I've been thinking less about what art represents and more about what it builds.

Not what it symbolizes, but what it actually does once it enters the world. What kinds of relationships it creates. What kinds of responsibilities it attracts. What happens when a project grows beyond its original intention and starts becoming infrastructure?

That's part of what drew me toward the work of photographer Ivan McClellan.

What began as a photographic exploration of Black rodeo culture became a celebrated monograph, a long-term body of documentary work, and eventually the creation of Eight Seconds Rodeo, an event that now attracts thousands of attendees and some of the top athletes in the sport.

What interested me wasn't simply the scale of what he'd built. It was the way he talked about it. There was no mythology around the process. No polished origin story. No claim that he had a master plan.

Instead, there seemed to be an ongoing question underneath everything: What does it mean to be useful?

Domenic Toliver: What began as a photography project seems to have become something much larger than photography. Did you see any of that coming?

Ivan McClellan: Not at all.

Growing up in Kansas City, Black cowboys were just part of the landscape. I knew people with horses. I knew people with ranches. We'd ride horses at church functions and family gatherings. It wasn't something I thought much about because it was familiar.

Years later, when I ended up at a Black rodeo as an adult, something clicked. I wish I had some more intellectual explanation than that, but honestly, I just liked being there.

I liked the people. I liked the style. I liked the food. I liked watching folks do things that seemed completely impossible. If you stop and think about what bull riders actually do, it's insane. A human being willingly climbs onto the back of an animal that weighs close to a ton and is actively trying to launch them into the atmosphere. It's ridiculous. It's dangerous. It's beautiful.

And what struck me was how welcoming everyone was. Nobody cared that I wasn't a cowboy. Nobody cared that I showed up with a camera. People introduced me to their families. They told me stories. They pointed me toward the people they thought I should meet.

So I kept going back.

At first I thought it was a photography project. Then I thought maybe it would become a book. But over time it became something much bigger than that. It started affecting who I spent time with, where I traveled, what I cared about, and what kind of work felt meaningful to me.

Before I knew it, I wasn't really documenting a community from the outside anymore. I had relationships in it. I had people I cared about. I was invested in what happened to them.

That's ultimately what led to the rodeo.

The funny thing is that people look at it now and assume there was some grand strategy behind it. There wasn't. I wasn't sitting around trying to build a business or a brand. I was going to rodeos and seeing athletes doing extraordinary things for relatively little money. Horses are expensive. Trailers are expensive. Trucks are expensive. Everything about rodeo costs money.

Meanwhile these athletes are risking their bodies every weekend. I remember looking at that and thinking there had to be a bigger stage. There had to be a way to create more opportunity. So my entire business plan was basically: what if we threw a rodeo and gave away a lot of money?

That was it.

I'd never planned an event before. Not a concert. Not a festival. Not a birthday party. Then suddenly I was trying to figure out livestock contracts, dirt, insurance, sponsorships, ticketing, prize money, and a hundred other things I knew absolutely nothing about.

Looking back, it's kind of embarrassing how little I knew.

Dom: But somehow it worked.

Ivan: Somehow. I mean, the first year was a complete mess, we had no business pulling it off. People were packed into bleachers that were too small. Everybody was sweating. Everybody was dressed up. Nobody knew exactly what was about to happen, including me, but there was something really special about that.

Looking back, I think everybody was willing it into existence. The athletes, the crowd, the sponsors, me. Nobody knew exactly what the event was supposed to be, so everybody brought their own hopes into the room.

I remember looking around and thinking that I'd never been in a space quite like it. There were people who had never seen a rodeo before sitting next to people who had spent their entire lives around horses. There were Black cowboys who had traveled across the country to compete. There were folks dressed like they were headed to the Met Gala sitting next to people wearing boots they'd probably owned for twenty years.

It felt alive.

Now we're in arenas. The production is completely different. We have giant video screens and lighting packages and sponsors and all the things that come with a major event. But honestly, every year we'd finish one and I'd think, "Well, I don't want to do that exact same thing again."

So we'd make it bigger, then we'd have to figure out how to pay for making it bigger, then more people would show up, then we'd have to make it bigger again. Somehow that's become what it is today. What's interesting is that as the event got bigger, the questions got bigger too.

Dom: What kind of questions came up?

Ivan: Whether any of it is actually useful. That's the thing I think about most now.

Early on, I thought the problem was money. Or at least I thought money was a major part of the problem. These athletes deserved larger purses, they deserved bigger audiences, they deserved more opportunities, and I still believe that; but after a while you realize people have whole lives.

You can create an opportunity, hand somebody a check, get them on the front page of the New York Times, but that's not the same thing as transformation.

A lot of these cowboys are navigating challenges that have nothing to do with rodeo. They're dealing with family responsibilities, financial literacy, legal issues, probation requirements, transportation challenges, healthcare access, housing concerns, child support obligations, and all the same things that millions of Americans are trying to navigate.

Sometimes people assume that if somebody wins a big check, everything changes, but it doesn't work that way.

You start realizing that success isn't just about talent. It's not even just about opportunity. It's about support systems. It's about knowledge. It's about having people around you who can help you navigate complicated situations.

There are athletes I've met who could compete with anybody in the world if talent were the only thing that mattered, but talent is rarely the only thing that matters. That's where I started wrestling with this question of usefulness, because the deeper I got into this work, the more I realized I wasn't just photographing people anymore. I cared what happened to them. And when you care about someone, you start wondering where your responsibility begins and where it ends.

Dom: Do you ever feel pressure to solve those problems?

Ivan: Absolutely. And I think that's a dangerous place to be.

Early on, people assumed I was some rich guy with a camera who loved rodeo. They'd ask for gas money, or ask me to cover their entry fees at another rodeo. They'd ask for help getting somewhere and I understand that, people ask for help when they need help, but I’m also not rich, just a guy working a dayjob during the day and photographing cowboys or planning rodeos at night. I am not anybody's solution, and neither is the rodeo.

At some point you realize people had lives before you arrived and they're going to have lives after you're gone. The rodeo is one thing that happened in that story. It's not the entire story.

I can create opportunities, visibility, a platform, I can connect people, but the older I get, the less my ego thinks I’m able to live somebody else’s life for them, the less I’m able to fix their problems. I'd rather build something useful and let people decide what to do with it. That's a much healthier place to operate from.

Dom: Do you think the rodeo has become a symbol?

Ivan: Yeah, I do. The buckle means something; covering the rankest bull means something; getting an invite to compete at the biggest-money Black rodeo in the country means something to these athletes. They show up because they want to test themselves against other great athletes and that's exciting. But honestly, the thing that excites me most has nothing to do with the competition, it's watching a young person in the audience, in the middle of Portland or Philadelphia, watching them catch a glimpse of this world for the first time.

Maybe they didn't know Black cowboys existed. Maybe they didn't know there were people who looked like them doing any of these things. Then suddenly they're sitting in the arena watching it happen, and that’s powerful.

I spent a lot of my own life looking for examples, looking for people who were doing things that felt possible but still seemed out of reach. I think a lot of us do that. You can't become something you've never seen, or at least it's a lot harder. So if a kid leaves the rodeo believing the world is a little bigger than they thought it was when they walked in, that's enough for me. That's a win, sometimes that's the thing that changes everything.

Dom: Last question. A friend of mine is a big horse girl and she’s doing a project on dream horses, so I got to ask, Dream horse?

Ivan: Easy, a blue roan, and honestly, a bucking bronc. People see them as wild, but that's exactly what I love about them. At the end of the day, they still belong to themselves. There's something beautiful about that.

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Ivan McClellan is a photojournalist and designer based in Portland, Oregon. His work reveals marginalized aspects of black culture and challenges broad assumptions and myths about racial identity in America.

Domenic Toliver is an artist working across photography, film, performance, and social practice. His work explores collaboration, presence, and storytelling as ways to build connection and challenge dominant narratives.