Black jockeys who rode in the Kentucky Derby are depicted standing and sitting astride saddles. Intricate stitching, brightly colored fabric and full scale bring a strong presence to the quilts.
“I've been an oil painter for about 10 or 15 years, and I wanted to do something that was quite different,” Eugene Poole Jr., the man behind the quilts, said.
Poole considered mediums like sculpture, but he liked the idea of being able to take the colors of oil paints and find fabric equivalents.
“I could change my actual paints for swaths of fabric and still have the vibrance and still have my color palette,” Poole said.
Since first picking up quilting in 2021, he has quilted more than 100 pieces, all depicting important figures in Black history and culture.
Thirty-one of those featuring Black jockeys who rode in the Kentucky Derby will be on display at the Kentucky Center for African American Heritage in an exhibition entitled “Reflections N Black – Kentucky Derby Jockeys,” opening April 25.
“I just love the fact that he has put so much time in venerating all of the Black jockeys, significant Black jockeys, and I think that that's an important thing for us to commemorate,” Aukram Burton, the executive director of the Kentucky Center for African American Heritage, said.
A few of the featured jockeys include Oliver Lewis, who won the very first Kentucky Derby riding Aristides; Alonzo Clayton, who won the 1892 Derby at the age of 15; and Willie Simms, who won multiple Derby races and created the crouched riding style used by jockeys today.
Poole, who grew up in Hopkinsville, said it’s important to find ways to remember the role these men played in horse racing and Black history more broadly.
“If you don't know where you come from, you can end up anywhere,” Poole said. “At a minimum, the African American population, it'd be great if other people would get on board as well, would be able to understand that these are men who actually sacrificed as young teenage enslaved boys who handled horses, who took care of them in the stables.”
Poole has tried to depict the jockeys as close to their real selves as possible. One piece, from start to finish, can take him 300 to 400 hours. He looks at photos of jockeys, researches them and matches his fabric colors to the silks they wore when racing.
“When this piece is being built, there's a conversation that's taking place. I'm looking at their photograph and I'm asking them the question,” Poole said of the historic figures he depicts. “By default, I have become somewhat of a historian, to some degree, because I have to learn the history, the background on these men, and what that does that helps to inform the type of expression that I want to put on the face. It informs the positioning.”
One of the only parts of Poole’s quilt that deviates from true to life are the colors he uses for the jockey’s skin tone. Instead of various shades of browns, Poole employs reds and blues, shading the halves of the jockeys’ faces and hands in warm and cool palettes.
For Poole, red is associated with feelings of anger and tenacity, while blue conveys a calming and serene energy.
“I wanted to juxtapose those two colors,” Poole said. “At times, they had to be docile because they had to survive. And then there was times when they were enraged about what was happening either to them and their families as teenage enslaved young men during the 1800s to 1900s.”
Telling the full story of the Black jockeys who played pivotal roles in the early days of the Kentucky Derby is the heart of the exhibit.
“It’s important also to understand why people say, ‘Well, what happened to them?’ Well, many of them went on to Europe because of the racism within the horse industry here,” Burton, with the Kentucky Center for African American Heritage, said.
Their departure from the country is an important part of their story, Burton and Poole said, but it doesn’t take away from their legacy in Kentucky.
“It's not like they just disappeared and went away. Yes, they went on to Europe, became very, very, extremely famous, but the legacy that they leave behind is their families, who continue to go on today. And we need to make sure that we recognize this,” Poole said.
Burton hopes that the exhibit will be a launching point for conversations, forums and exhibits at the Kentucky Center for African American Heritage about how African American people have participated in and celebrated Derby.
Reflections N Black – Kentucky Derby Jockeys opens April 25 and is available to the public through July 31.
