Opening Night Friday, July 3rd from 5:00-7:30PM with the artist in attendance
Artist talk with Thom Ross and Ralph & Barb Melfi (as Annie Oakley & William Cody) Thursday, July 2nd from 4:00-5:00pm
Hemmings Gallery is pleased to present a new exhibition of paintings by Thom Ross with theopening night reception on July 3rd, 2026. This subject of Ross's new show is Buffalo Bill’s Wild West — the legendary touring spectacle that helped define how America, and the world, imagined the frontier.
Debuting on the eve of the nation’s 250th anniversary, the exhibition arrives at a moment of heightened reflection on American identity, memory, and myth. Founded by William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody in 1883, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West became one of the earliest and most influential global exports of American culture, touring the United States and Europe for decades and introducing millions to an imagined vision of the frontier.
Ross’s paintings bring this world vividly to life. Through expressive brushwork and dynamic compositions, he captures both the energy of the arena and the presence of its iconic figures, while also reflecting on the layered and often complex cultural narratives embedded within the spectacle itself. From scenes of high drama and action to quieter, more introspective moments, the works in this exhibition reveal a nuanced perspective on a defining chapter of American cultural history—one where performance and reality became inseparably intertwined.
For Ross, "The West we think we know was staged, performed, and retold long before we ever saw it. I’m interested in that space—where fact and fiction blur, where reality becomes myth. And how Cody seemed to move with ease from one to the other.”
Rather than simply revisiting the past, Ross reexamines it through his work. He invites viewers to consider how the mythology of the West was constructed, performed, and ultimately carried forward into contemporary imagination.
“After more than fifty years of painting, Thom Ross has developed a visual language that is instantly recognizable and immediately engaging, but it’s the depth of storytelling, the ideas he unearths beneath the surface that stay with you, " says Edward Hemmings, gallery owner.
Born in San Francisco in 1952 and raised in Sausalito, Ross earned his fine arts degree from California State University, Chico, in 1974. He describes himself as “a storyteller who paints" and is widely recognized for bringing contemporary energy to iconic frontier subjects.
Some of his best known work includes life-sized installation recreations of pivotal Western scenes and figures, including his 2005 reimagining of Custer’s Last Stand at the Little Bighorn site and a 2008 installation of Buffalo Bill Cody and his Wild West troupe at San Francisco’s Cliff House. Ross was named “Best Original Period Western Painter” by True West magazine in 2012, and his work is held in public and private collections throughout the United States. He currently lives and works in Lamy, New Mexico.
In this latest exhibition, Ross returns to Buffalo Bill from a fresh angle often using period images as a point of departure for a new painted meditation on performance, memory, invention, and the enduring visual power of the American West.
“Hemmings Gallery has long admired Thom Ross’s ability to bring historical material into the present with intensity, wit, and emotional charge,” says Hemmings. “This new series feels especially timely. It connects American spectacle, national mythology, and the image-making machinery of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West to a moment when the country is again thinking about how it tells its own story.”