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 male athlete. 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. The works presented here, made by artists who have appropriated, riffed on, complicated, and variously re-presented athletic imagery, demonstrate that the male athlete is a far more ambiguous, polyvalent figure in our collective cultural imagination than ever before.

Photographer Collier Schorr has said, “I want to show the whole temperature of masculinity because—and I can only approach it as a woman—from the outside, masculinity has been depicted in very black-and-white terms.” Accordingly, the artists selected for this exhibition reject such comfortable “black-and-white” imagery. Shaun Leonardo’s dramatic boxing performance calls attention to the intimate, homosocial dynamics that structure very physical sports. A video work by Mark Bradford shows him—a tall, gay, black man and former hairdresser from south-central Los Angeles—playing basketball while wearing a long silken ball gown in the colors of the Los Angeles Lakers. Hank Willis Thomas’s photographs deconstruct the ways in which race and sexuality are exploited to brand and market male athletes; and Joe Sola’s video works assume an outsider’s perspective on football, addressing the social exclusivity of competitive athletics through humor and farce. Matthew Barney’s early sculptural work with Vaseline and weight-training equipment, as well as his body-based performance practice, stresses the sexual, sometimes abject dimension of athletic training.

Several artists and theorists have argued convincingly that social identities—including race, gender, and sexuality—are performed, coded, and contingent. However, the professional male athlete has until recently been overlooked by critically minded artists, critics, art historians, and curators.

Mixed Signals is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue with an essay by the show's curator, Christopher Bedford, assistant curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA); the exhibition is an expanded version of Bedford's Contemporary Projects 11: HardTargets—Masculinity and American Sports, organized by LACMA.