Mixed Signals: Artists Consider Masculinity in Sports

Despite all that has changed since sexual and social identity became a hot-button topic in art production and discourse throughout the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s, one American stereotype still remains particularly entrenched: that of the straight male athlete, as someone who is typically aggressive, hyper-competitive, and emotionally undemonstrative. Mixed Signals focuses on artists from the mid-1990s to the present who question the notion of the male athlete as the last bastion of uncomplicated, authentic identity in American culture during the preceding decades.