You may think you know the Lone Star State. But look closer, and you’ll realize this state is a Texas-sized paradox. On one hand, it is a caricature of itself: big boots, big ranches, big hair, big everything. And certainly, the hype is real—around here, those stereotypes aren’t just valid, they’re proudly embraced, the collective result of generations of shared culture, community, hard work, and values.
Yet there’s another Texas, a multilayered and sophisticated Texas, where Hollywood stars, global entrepreneurs, and visitors seeking out some good old-fashioned fun don cowboy hats at the rodeo, and bona fide ranchers with spurs on their boots and silk scarves around their necks hold court at the best table in the best restaurant in town.
Nowhere are those dualities more evident than in Fort Worth. Meet the movers and shakers who make this big little city a microcosm of Texas complexity.
Jackie Chieffalo, co-owner of Chieffalo Americana, at her Camp Bowie Boulevard store.
Growing up in Greece, Abraham Alexander knew from an early age what it felt like to be an outsider. His parents immigrated to Athens from Nigeria before he was born and, there, the family didn’t always feel welcome. “We were treated as second-class citizens,” he recalls.
Nonetheless, he loved his first adopted home, especially the beaches, where he and his four brothers would battle the waves while their mother looked on from the sand. “I just remember the air being crisp. I remember the freedom to explore,” he says. “The Acropolis and the Parthenon were my playground.”
But it wasn’t enough; the family began to search for another home where they would feel more included. They found it in Texas.
There was an adjustment period of course—no beaches! no Acropolis!—but soon, Alexander began to feel accepted in a way he’d never felt before. “Texas gave me a welcoming embrace,” he says. “It just felt so authentic, and it gave me an opportunity to rediscover myself.”
Alas, he would encounter more struggles in his second adopted home: the tragic death of his mother, who was killed by a drunk driver; estrangement from his father. Yet Texas—and Texans—continued to embrace him, and even adopt him, as a friend’s family took him in after the loss of his mother. In Fort Worth, attending Texas Wesleyan College, he found another tribe in soccer. But it was a chance encounter with music that would change his life forever.
Alexander was thrust into the national spotlight—and became a Fort Worth hometown hero—when his song “Like a Bird,” co-written with Black Pumas’ Adrian Quesada, was nominated for an Academy Award.
Enamored with the power of music, he played obsessively—“eight, nine, 10 hours a day,” he says. When he wasn’t playing, he was immersing himself in the local music scene, where he discovered a passion for blues and epic guitarists like Stevie Ray Vaughan and Bobby Womack. In 2015, a chance encounter with Leon Bridges, then still an up-and-coming musician, resulted in Alexander humming backup for a track on the Grammy-nominated album Coming Home. “He encouraged me to pursue my music,” Alexander says of Bridges. “He became my mentor and one of my best friends.”
And so, with the support of his many adopted Texas families, he took off. He released an EP of four original songs, blending blues, R&B, pop, and even gospel, with deeply personal lyrics such as Tell me if I go too far / Would I become the lonesome lone star? / Would I ever find my way back?—and picked up gigs all over Texas, opening for Ginuwine at Dallas’s House of Blues, performing with Black Pumas, and recording “Summer Moon” with Bridges and fellow musician Kevin Kaarl (the song is about their local Fort Worth coffee shop).
Alexander strums his guitar in the Goodnight Suite at Bowie House, Auberge Resorts Collection.
Alexander poses in front of a collage by American artist Ingrid Dee Magidson in the Goodnight Suite at Bowie House.
In 2022, he released Sea/Sons, his debut album and a vulnerable ode to family, tragedy, and those endless summer days on the beaches of Athens with his brothers. “A lot of the album was expressing the pain that I’ve experienced in my life,” he says. The album debuted at 42 on the Billboard chart and led to a whirlwind of dream performances—Stagecoach, South by Southwest, touring with Gary Clark Jr. and The Lumineers.
Then came an even bigger break: a text message from Black Pumas guitarist Adrian Quesada, and a link to an early trailer for Sing Sing, a film, based on a true story, about Sing Sing prison’s Rehabilitation Through the Arts program. “Adrian said, ‘Watch this, and I dare you not to cry,’ and sure enough, I’m tearing up,” Alexander says. “I knew that the message within this film was important, and I wanted to be part of it.”
Over the next 48 hours, Alexander penned “Like a Bird,” an emotional track that touched on his own experiences with pain and alienation. Alexander and Quesada recorded it together—remotely—“and the studio loved it,” Alexander says. “Like a Bird” perfectly captured the desperation and hope of Sing Sing, and as the film drew nominations—BAFTA, Critics’ Choice—Alexander’s evocative song became the anthem for its message of redemption.
That led to his biggest break of all (so far): the Academy Award nomination for Best Original Song. When it was announced in January, the city and people of Fort Worth celebrated the honor as if it were their own. And in many ways, Alexander says, it was.
“I went to Bowie House not too long after it was announced, and everyone there was rallying around me, congratulating me,” he says. It was the familiar Texas embrace he’d felt countless times before—and it meant more than ever.
In 2018, when Jon Flaming showed his Modern Cowboy series for the first time, collectors took note—one way or another. The paintings depicted all the classic cowboy virtues: the 10-gallon hat, the boots, the spurs. A puff of smoke escaping from a cigarette. A trusty steed galloping through the desert. But this was no classic Western art, none of the false light of Frederic Remington or the cowboys-and-Indians tropes of Charlie Russell. Flaming’s canvases were graphic, colorful, with dungarees and oil derricks and cacti and bucking broncos rendered in blocks of vibrant orange and green and blue and red. It was new. It was different. It was Western … and it wasn’t.
That’s not to dismiss the original masters (“I’m standing firmly on their shoulders,” Flaming says of Remington and Russell). In fact, the artist looks at his work as an homage—a tip of the hat, if you will—to the painters who pioneered the genre and, even more so, their iconic subjects. “I just want to put it on a canvas in a way that nobody else has before.”
Flaming’s own trail started much in the way of his subjects: on a cattle ranch—his grandfather’s in Wichita, Kansas. “My earliest memories were of seeing these cowboys and ranchers and farmers working, and that just did something to me,” he says. When his family moved to Dallas, he sought out—and quickly found—solace in the city’s rural outskirts, on long drives that took him to the ranches and grasslands that made him feel at home.
Flaming sketches in his art studio just outside Fort Worth.
Flaming’s studio brims with inspiration, from personal photos and artifacts from his childhood to Western memorabilia.
But modern life took over, as it so often does. In college, he studied graphic design and eventually went on to run a branding and design firm, where he created campaigns for Neiman Marcus, American Airlines, and FedEx. He was married with three children when the ranching life came back to him through art. “After I put the kids to bed, my second life would start,” he recalls. In his garage, blank canvases on easels awaited. “I realized, if this is my dream, nobody is going to come along and do it for me.”
Twenty-five years of moonlighting later, Flaming retired his business and officially launched his second act with Modern Cowboy. It marked an evolution—“my early work was more Impressionistic,” Flaming says—and a melding of styles, combining the Western art genre with his graphic design and abstract expressionist influences. It was Remington and Russell meets Paul Rand and Saul Bass (and even Pablo Picasso, whose work Flaming references often). “That blending and juxtaposition of shapes and subjects was intriguing to me.”
However graphic Flaming’s paintings are, they’re never flat. Using various tools, he scrapes and scratches molding paste over his canvases to create an appropriately rugged texture. When he scumbles paint across it, little indentations cause gradations in the color. It’s a careful process that adds depth and nuance to his bold shapes.
Seven years since “going pro,” Flaming’s art is shown all over Texas and beyond. His Pump Jack – Jack Rabbit hangs permanently in Fort Worth’s Amon Carter Museum of American Art, and this September, he will exhibit alongside other contemporary Western artists like Mark Maggiori and Le Fawnhawk at the second Far West pop-up gallery, taking place this year in Austin.
Jo Ellard came to Texas by way of Mississippi, and for years, Dallas was home. It was where she raised her two sons while her husband built his insurance business. Just 45 miles north of there, she purchased a ranch, where she bred a herd of mares—the Magnificent Seven, she called them—and honed her own equestrian skills, enough to be inducted into the National Cutting Horse Association Non-Pro Hall of Fame.
That endeavor led her to stray from her Dallas base to nearby Fort Worth, where equestrian competitions at the Will Rogers Memorial Center kept her in town for at least 75 days a year, all of which she spent in hotels. She grew fond of the city—its museums and culture, its people, and, of course, its legendary rodeo—but there was one thing she believed it was missing: “I wanted a really special hotel, five-star luxury, and I wanted it in the Cultural District.” So, ever the overachiever, she did it herself.
Thus, Bowie House, Auberge Resorts Collection was born. Located within walking distance of all the Cultural District’s attractions—Will Rogers Memorial Center (where the Fort Worth Stock Show and Rodeo takes place) and seven museums—it is the hotel Ellard wished for all those years on the road.
Like Ellard, Bowie House is a little bit country, a little bit modern, and completely original. More than 400 pieces of art—all personally collected by Ellard—fill the bold urban retreat, and few, if any, fit the tropes of the classic Western theme. Instead, you’ll find Kenyan Thandiwe Muriu’s vibrant patterned portraits, Dutch Max Zorn’s trick-of-the-eye tape art, and American Hijack’s street-art pieces that seem to jump off the canvas.
Bowie House is filled with more than 400 works of art—all personally collected by Ellard herself.
Still, there’s plenty about Bowie House that’s unmistakably Texan: rustic wood accents, rock crystal chandeliers, cowhides, and longhorn mounts. More artifacts come with a backstory, real or imagined: the beautifully finished vintage bar that had been secreted away in a warehouse for decades before Ellard rescued it; the antique pool table with burn marks on the rail (Ellard claims with a wink that one of them was made by Dean Martin’s cigarette).
But Bowie House is as much for its creator as it is for all of Fort Worth.
It is a hotel, of course, and thus it is for visitors, but it has become a beloved gathering place for locals too—where they go for dinner before the George Strait concert or late-night cocktails after the rodeo, where local celebrities like Taylor Sheridan and Leon Bridges sidle up to the bar next to real-life ranchers in Wranglers.
Rodger and Jackie Chieffalo dress many of those locals, as well as out-of-towners who want to look the part. The couple’s curated Western-wear shop, Chieffalo Americana, is a stylish manifestation of everything Fort Worth, starting first and foremost with Rodger’s short-brim hats. A Fort Worth native since the ’70s, he was introduced to the iconic Shady Oak hat—a status symbol of wealthy ranch owners made famous by President Lyndon B. Johnson—when he inherited a vintage example. It led to a small side business for the real estate developer: “I would source these antique 100% beaver felt hats and gift them to clients,” Rodger says.
Jackie and Rodger Chieffalo with their dog Luccio at their flagship store on Camp Bowie Boulevard.
Belt buckles, bolos, and other vintage finds are given a modern update at Chieffalo Americana.
One thing led to another, including a fortuitous meeting with Jackie, a handbag designer from Los Angeles, and today, the couple is the enviable picture of cowboy core, him in a fringe duster and boots and her in a fitted Western blouse and a bolo layered with vintage chains studded with diamonds and turquoise. Their two shops—one at Bowie House and another up the road—invite others to embrace the style too, brimming with an impressive collection of heritage pieces (a studded leather attaché, antique belt buckles, and those custom Shady Oak hats) as well as new finds (the couple recently convinced one of their California-based denim designers to start making boot-cut jeans—he sold out before he could fill their order).
The Chieffalos, like Ellard, are driven by the same authentic and uniquely multifaceted character of their hometown. “Fort Worth is refreshingly old-fashioned, but its people are sophisticated and philanthropic and educated,” says Jackie. Rodger adds: “And what they all appreciate is good style.”
That unique blend is evident in Fort Worth’s dining scene too, says Antonio Votta, executive chef at Bowie House’s destination restaurant, Bricks & Horses. Votta hails from Las Vegas and admits to being initially surprised by the locals’ welcome attitude to culinary experimentation. “Yes, steak and potatoes still reign supreme for most,” he says with a laugh. “But people are expanding their palates.” Votta nurtures their curiosity via Texas classics with a newfangled twist: the elevated pigs in a blanket made from puff pastry and Wagyu sausage from nearby Santo, Texas; the fish fry with an Asian flair, featuring buttermilk-soaked halibut, kimchi tartar sauce, and nori hush puppies.
Executive chef Antonio Votta elevates classic Texan dishes at Bowie House’s destination restaurant, Bricks & Horses.
The Bar at Bowie House’s centerpiece is a dramatic vintage bar Ellard sourced from an auction house in Waco, Texas.
Local sourcing is another value driving Votta’s menu: All the meat and most of the produce is sourced within 200 miles (neighboring by Texas standards), including at Taylor Sheridan’s 6666 Ranch in Guthrie. The locavore trend isn’t a trend at all in Fort Worth, says the chef; it couldn’t be more ingrained around these parts. “Some of these ranches are going on six generations, and some are more artisan-style ranches,” Votta says.