Jisu Sheen
Sketched lines decorated the walls at Southern Connecticut State University (SCSU)’s senior art exhibition Thursday afternoon, but SCSU senior Ty Abdul-Shakoor’s mind was on a different kind of draw.
Quick as lightning, he pulled out two bright orange cap guns from holsters around his waist, striking a picture-perfect pose as a New Haven cowboy, lost in the city but somehow right where he needed to be. This ranger wasn’t exactly lone. Behind him, staring out from the second dimension, was another cowboy. This one had leather chaps, a star-adorned ranger shirt, and those same candy-orange cap guns.
Abdul-Shakoor’s OUTLAW photo series, laid out in large-scale prints on the back wall of SCSU’s Buler Library basement gallery, told the story of a serious, dramatic cowboy on a mission in an unfamiliar place. Finding himself “immersed in the world of strangers in my own mind,” as Abdul-Shakoor writes in his artist statement for the photo series, the photographer explores the changing American city as the new frontier.
“I’m seeing a cowboy in New Haven,” said Tashae Dennis-Green, an MBA major at SCSU, about Abdul-Shakoor’s photo series. “It’s a dream, but I’m seeing it come through in the picture.” According to Ben Quesnel, an SCSU drawing professor, the show constituted “fun collections of people reflecting on past, present, and future times,” pointing to the playful orange toy guns as well as the enlarged ceramic bracelet and toys of SCSU senior Angelica Tiska.
“In one word, I’d call it inspiring,” Spencer Lane, an SCSU student in communication and media studies with a minor in creative writing, said. By the time he walked out of the show, he was filled with ideas on how to improve his own TV club at the university, and he’d resolved to write something “just for me.”
“It feels kind of surreal,” Abdul-Shakoor said of his first experience showing his art in an exhibition space. He made sure to have fun, using the space not just to display art but to live it.
“I always feel like a cowboy,” he told me, “always felt like one.” Like an actor on the red carpet with a look referencing their on-screen role, he and his cap gun holsters blurred the line between artist and character, hinting at the big secret: that by living, we recreate ourselves.
There was more to Abdul-Shakoor’s gallery opening outfit than just the cowboy element. He leaned his head down, revealing his SuperDuper hat, and turned around to show off his jacket with the same punchy logo. New Haven street fashion fans will recognize this brand as local artist Tyler Reid’s line, an evolution of his previous project SF (Stands For). And those with a sharp eye will recognize Reid himself as the cowboy in Abdul-Shakoor’s photos.
“We’ve known each other most of our lives,” Abdul-Shakoor said of Reid, his go-to model for whatever idea he finds himself itching to try. “He’s super responsive,” Abdul-Shakoor continued, and for this photo series in particular, “it helped that he doesn’t smile.”
When it came time to display the photos, Abdul-Shakoor said they were originally supposed to be “all in a row, like a film reel” but that there just wasn’t enough horizontal space on the wall. As you might guess from the cinematic feel of Abdul-Shakoor’s image composition, film has been on the artist’s mind. He thought about making a little film for his senior project, and one of his professors was surprised he didn’t make his concept into a video. Movie-making might just be on the horizon for this artist’s next moves.
For now, if you’d like to accompany the OUTLAW photos with an unofficial cinematic soundtrack, Abdul-Shakoor offered the sample from one of Jay‑Z’s tracks for the revenge Western film The Harder They Fall (2021): Nigerian Afrobeats legend Fela Kuti’s 1971 song “Let’s Start.”
“I thought of this photo in my head, and it was the last one I took,” Abdul-Shakoor told an audience member at the show, pointing to an image of the cowboy pointing his toy guns down at the camera, out-of-focus clouds breezing by in the distance. He sees the full images in his mind and, with the help of trusted friends, brings them to life.
“O l’oun t’awa se ni iy’ara, je ka bere,” Fela Kuti calls out in his song that would end up, 50 years later, in the pivotal scene of a cowboy flick — and four years after that, in the mental soundtrack for Abdul-Shakoor’s OUTLAW series.
There’s something we have come into the room to do, Kuti says, let us start.
SCSU’s senior art exhibit is up from Thursday, April 24 to Thursday, May 8, 2025 at the Buley Art Gallery on campus. Gallery hours are Monday through Thursday, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Ceramic work by Angelica Tiska (2025)
