Her mugshot was found in the Pinkerton papers. Laura Bullion was the only female member of Butch Cassidy’s Wild Bunch — born to a Native American father and a German mother, raised in outlaw country in Texas. She robbed trains, dressed as a man to do it, and fenced stolen goods. They called her the Rose of the Wild Bunch. Then they forgot her.

She received a five-year sentence. She served her time, moved to Memphis under a new name, became a seamstress, and died in 1961 — the last surviving member of the Wild Bunch — and almost no one knew.

In the original photograph, she does not have a black eye. In this painting, she does. It is not an accident.

This piece is about what happens to women who move through systems of male power — who are anointed by those systems, made useful, and ultimately sacrificed. Women who reach for power often do so through proximity to powerful men, and whether they are qualified or not, the impression left is that they were not. Ambitious women become instruments of the very systems that repress them, and when those systems need a scapegoat, it is always the woman who pays. The background is collaged with pulp Western novel covers: the mythology that immortalized the men she rode with and erased her entirely. Her face glows magenta against their faded glory.