Mike Hooves and Bryce Maruk’s ‘Rhinestone Cowfolx’ is a Prairie Love Story
Werklund Centre +15 Exhibiting Artists & Exhibition Curator (Left to right) l Front: Sumit Munjal, Aduke Akinwumi, Bryce Maruk, Mike Hooves, Jordan Baylon l Back : Wilmer Aburto, Boban Stojanović l Photo: Courtesy of Wilmer Aburto
Through murals, drag, illustration, animation and years spent uplifting Calgary’s queer and artistic communities, Mike Hooves’ mark is across the city. Created from more than a decade of shared life, art and Prairie queer identity, Rhinestone Cowfolx brings Mike Hooves and Bryce Maruk’s creative worlds together for the first time. As the installation remains on view at Werklund Centre, it has also become a gathering place for a community celebrating Hooves’ enduring impact.
Mike Hooves is still everywhere.
Their artwork remains scattered across Calgary, a city where they made the deliberate choice to build a life and artistic practice. Just as importantly to those who knew them, Hooves spent years showing up for other artists, queer community and young people finding their own creative voices. Photographer, artist, and curator Wilmer Aburto witnessed that impact for more than a decade.
“If somebody lived in this city or is coming through [and] never knew who Mike Hooves is or what their art is,” Aburto says, “they’re in the presence of somebody that lived a life truly for their art and for community.”
That presence is especially palpable right now inside the +15 Galleries at Werklund Centre.
There, Rhinestone Cowfolx continues to spin and shimmer behind glass. Created by Hooves and their partner of more than a decade, Bryce Maruk, it was the first time the married couple formally combined their artistic practices into a single installation. It is filled with pieces of their life together.
“Except for the disco ball cowboy hat, every bit of Rhinestone Cowfolx came from our apartment,” Maruk says. “So in a way I also see an idealized version of our home, something that I have lost since Mike’s passing.”
Hooves passed away in August after living with breast cancer. In the weeks since, the space surrounding Rhinestone Cowfolx has changed, too. Flowers, photographs, artwork, letters and handwritten messages have accumulated outside the installation as people continue to visit and celebrate the life and love for Hooves.
Nearby is a rose from Hooves’ 2022 installation Trans Is A Flower, a work created during Maruk’s transition that depicts the flower at different stages of bloom. There are chaps referencing the history of gay rodeo, nods to the hanky code, pieces pulled from the couple’s wardrobes and a bust wearing drag makeup beneath a cowboy hat covered in pieces of mirrorball.
“While Mike and I had been together for over a decade and assisted each other in countless artistic projects, Rhinestone Cowfolx marked our first collaborative installation,” Maruk says. “We were a married couple, but hadn’t ever married our artistic styles.”
Working with the Calgary Queer Arts Society and Werklund Centre, Aburto envisioned the +15 Galleries as a space where queer artists whose practices were already intertwined with their communities could be brought together.
“I thought, what if we give and present the opportunity to artists that already have a history of doing things for community?” Aburto recalls. “This is kind of an opportunity to bring all these folks together and they can just have fun and play and queer it up.”
The resulting exhibition brought together Aduke Akinwumi, Boban Stojanović, Dorienne Proulx, Jordan Baylon, Phillip Murray Bandura and Sumit Munjal alongside Hooves and Maruk. Across the +15 windows, their installations move through radically different expressions of queer experience: Akinwumi's triumphant self-portraiture; Stojanović's reflections on the queer body, exile and survival; Proulx's exploration of kinship and interconnectedness; Baylon's interactive web of gossip and community care; Murray Bandura's collisions of glass, concrete, glitter and queer excess; and Munjal's intimate rendering of the interior world of a closeted queer South Asian self.
Werklund Centre +15 Exhibiting Artists, Calgary Queer Arts Society's Executive Director and Exhibition Curator (Left to right) l Front: Mike Hooves, Dorienne Proulx, Bryce Maruk l Back: Boban Stojanović, Jordan Baylon, Wilmer Aburto, Shone Thistle, Phillip Murray Bandura l Photo: Courtesy of Wilmer Aburto
“I think that this show really beautifully captured artists that are super talented, that have a voice and visibility in the community and have also been giving to community for years and years,” he says. When he thought about Hooves and Maruk, he imagined them together.
“They’re both very creative people and have done projects separately,” Aburto says. “I had always pictured them doing something together.”
Hooves and Maruk began imagining ways to combine Hooves’ work as an illustrator and muralist with Maruk’s media-art practice, also known as a music enthusiast and journalist under the moniker of Locked Groove. A few months into the process, however, Hooves’ breast cancer had metastasized. The treatment was aggressive, and plans for Hooves to paint a mural in the exhibition space became increasingly challenging. Then the pair encountered artist Amaris MacLean and a cowboy hat covered in mirrorball pieces. It became the centrepiece around which everything else could orbit.
“We were inspired as lifelong Prairie queers to dig through our wardrobes and find the western wear we had collected over our decade together,” Maruk says. “We nod to the crossover of cowboys and queer culture—chaps in tribute to the gay rodeo, as well as flagging via the hanky code.”
Werklund Centre +15 Exhibiting Artist l Mike Hooves l Photo Credit: Wilmer Aburto
There are more private histories embedded among those references. Hooves’ wedding hat sits alongside Trans Is A Flower, which Maruk says was inspired by the phrase “give them their flowers” and asks viewers to honour trans people through every stage of transition. For Aburto, watching the installation come together also meant watching Hooves and Maruk’s relationship become part of the artwork.
As Hooves’ health declined around the scheduled May installation, the other artists offered to help realize whatever Hooves wanted to create. Aburto remembers telling them that a drawing, video or voice memo would be enough for the group to work from. Hooves had another idea. “Mike was like, ‘I want to do it. I want to do it myself and I want to be the one who does it,’” Aburto recalls.
When Hooves felt well enough, they and Maruk came to the gallery to install the work. Aburto remembers Hooves spending portions of the day seated in front of the window while Maruk moved between spaces, the people around them helping where they could while Hooves continued directing the installation.
“What was so special about that process is just kind of seeing them collaborate and actually both be there for each other in such a strong way,” Aburto says. “Bryce and Mike’s connection was just so beautiful. And I look back now and think, what a gift that was that I was able to be there and part of that process.”
One of Aburto’s favourite memories from that day was witnessing Hooves’ dedication to detail. On a rotating component of the installation, Hooves individually placed crystals onto its surface. “I was like, wow, Mike, they’re really gonna do that. They’re gonna go and place each one of these,” he remembers.
The finished installation folds their respective artistic languages together. The movement recalls Maruk’s long relationship with music and vinyl; the face bears makeup inspired by Hooves’ drag persona Mx. Jendr. Maruk had been the one to suggest painting the bust in drag makeup.
“When I look at it now, I see a decade of Mike continually dialling in their makeup skills to become a truly unique and compelling drag performer,” Maruk says. “Watching the coloured light reflect off the hat as it spins brings me back to the bars where Mike performed, where the glimmer of rhinestones and sequins add movement and depth to every performance.”
For Aburto, Rhinestone Cowfolx ultimately became “a story of love, period.”
“Regardless of whether it’s a story of queerness or transness or the many beautiful ways that queer love can exist in this world,” he says, “ultimately, the power is the love.”
After Hooves passing, artists involved in the exhibition began contacting Aburto asking if they could meet at the gallery. They wanted to bring flowers and they wanted to be together. Aburto initially wondered how a spontaneous memorial could exist in a public +15 space where the exhibition itself had been carefully installed behind glass. Instead, Werklund Centre staff brought out a table covered in black linen and it had become an extension of the installation.
“People have brought flowers, they brought gifts,” Aburto says. “There have been letters that have been sent through the mail that arrived from B.C.”
Visitors have continued to respect what has become both a memorial and gathering place. Paper versions of the flower from Trans Is A Flower have been made available for people to write messages on, with plans for those messages to eventually be given to Hooves’ family. For Maruk, even the flowers changing over time have taken on meaning.
“There’s a certain poetry to how the flowers people have brought have begun to wilt, pushing the idea beyond ‘trans is a flower in all stages of bloom,’ to encompass a return to earth that helps feed the soil in an infinite cycle of rebirth and re-bloom,” she says. “It reminds me that trans people have always been here, and will forever continue to be.”
Werklund Centre +15 Exhibition | Remembering Mike Hooves table l Photo Credit: Wilmer Aburto
Aburto has watched the space change as people arrive and leave things behind. Sometimes he returns simply to see how the flowers are doing. He has also walked Hooves’ mother, stepfather, sisters and extended family through the exhibition. “It felt very honourable to see the family respond to it,” he says, “and they’re recognizing the pieces that were part of the exhibition that represented the union of Mike and Bryce.”
The public response has already produced numerous tributes to Hooves, but Maruk is in no hurry to turn their life into something fixed in the past. “Something I tell myself and those around me is that we have our entire lives to honour Mike’s legacy,” she says. “Calgary is fortunate to have their creativity endure through myriad public artworks, but even those barely reflect how prolific an artist Mike was.”
Aburto remembers that generosity extending beyond Hooves’ own work. Even during one of his final visits with Hooves in hospital, he saw it.
Aburto’s partner, Colin—who performs as Subliminal Rabbit—had released a song called “Licky Licky Sucky” that became a running joke between them because Hooves insisted it deserved more attention and also included the track in numerous drag numbers. During the hospital visit, Hooves appeared to be asleep as everyone spoke quietly around them. Then, without warning, Hooves started singing the lyrics.
“I had no idea that you even knew who was in this room right now,” Aburto remembers thinking.
For him, the moment captured something fundamental about Hooves: their instinct to champion someone else’s creativity, even then. “That’s just a testament of how Mike was just celebrating artists,” he says. “‘This is that song. This is that song that you [Subliminal Rabbit] did that I love.’”
It was important for Aburto that the exhibition was not only a celebration of queer artists, but those who continually gave something back to the communities around them. There is lso something particularly profound about Hooves’ decision to build their artistic life in Alberta. For queer and trans people, the Prairies can be a difficult place to call home. Rather than looking elsewhere for belonging, Hooves invested deeply in the place they were from: creating in, working with youth and queer communities, and continually making space for other artists alongside them.
“If somebody lived in this city or is coming through [and] never knew who Mike Hooves is or what their art is,” Aburto says, “they’re in the presence of somebody that lived a life truly for their art and for community.”
Rhinestone Cowfolx installation still spins, with the rhinestones still catching the light. The flowers and messages left by people who loved them continue to gather around something Hooves and Maruk built together and Maruk isn’t thinking about the end of that story. “Rhinestone Cowfolx will eventually come down,” she says, “but their art and legacy will undoubtedly be carried forward in the years to come.”
Rhinestone Cowfolx by Mike Hooves and Bryce Maruk remains on display at Werklund Centre’s +15 Galleries until November 1, offering visitors a little more time to experience the work, celebrate the life and art Hooves shared with Calgary, and leave their own messages of remembrance.
