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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.

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