The Stockyard was a stage
2023. Earthenware, slip, glaze, pastel, woven textile, polyfill, metal beads.
Installation, 9’x5’x5’
NCECA 2024 Student Juried Exhibition, Graduate Award For Excellence ‑ 1st
The masculinity constructed around the American cowboy archetype has served as a bar
for the realized heterosexual male identity. Life in the early 20th century on the range was lonely
and dominated by men, insomuch that homosexual company was the only company to seek. My
proximity to rodeo culture, with its fringe, sequins, leather, and grandiose displays proved that
24the obsession with attaching “heteronormativity” to “cowboy” was unrealistic. As a viewer, there
is merely a thin line of separation between the performances in the Professional Rodeo Cowboys
Association and the International Gay Rodeo Association that cue the viewer, by the use of queer
irony, into knowing which they are watching.
This theatricality in the masculine performance of rodeo in American culture sits on
display in the sculpture, “The Stockyard Was a Stage.” This figure explores the femininity of
male bodies as it nods to drag culture. Set within the scene of a fenced rodeo stockyard beneath
an expansive sky, the rain becomes stage curtains. The weaving hangs like tassels and fringe that
both rodeo and drag culture share, as a wave of this fringed mass pours from the figure’s hat like
water. The thick fringe is strung with steel beads, nodding to these performance’s glitz and the
nipple piercing on the figure.