Mixed Signals: Artists Consider Masculinity in Sports

Despite all that has changed since sexual and social identity became hot-button topics in art production and discourse in the 1970s, 80s and 90s, one American stereotype still remains particularly entrenched--that of the aggressive, hypercompetitive, emotionally undemonstrative, heterosexual male athlete. Mixed Signalsfocuses on artists from the mid-1990s to the present who have questioned the notion of the male athlete as the last bastion of uncomplicated, authentic identity in...
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Despite all that has changed since sexual and social identity became hot-button topics in art production and discourse in the 1970s, 80s and 90s, one American stereotype still remains particularly entrenched--that of the aggressive, hypercompetitive, emotionally undemonstrative, heterosexual male athlete. Mixed Signalsfocuses on artists from the mid-1990s to the present who have questioned the notion of the male athlete as the last bastion of uncomplicated, authentic identity in American culture during the preceding decades. The works presented here, made by artists who have appropriated, riffed on, complicated and variously represented athletic imagery, demonstrate that the male athlete is a far more ambiguous, polyvalent figure in our collective cultural imagination than ever before. Artists include Matthew Barney, Mark Bradford, Marcelino Gonçalves, Lyle Ashton Harris, Brian Jungen, Kurt Kauper, Shaun El. C. Leonardo, Kori Newkirk, Catherine Opie, Paul Pfeiffer, Marco Rios, Collier Schorr, Joe Sola, Sam Taylor-Wood and Hank Willis Thomas.