I'm Your Man

Co-curated with Millee Tibbs

*Images by Millee Tibbs

ISE Cultural Center, New York, NY

Awarded ISE Cultural Foundation Emerging Curator Award 

Jesse Burke

Nick Dong

Casey Doyle

Amery Kessler

Mark Newport

Kambui Olujimi

Ryan Roth

Ryan Standfest

I'm Your Man explores the construction of masculine identity through performance. In art, femininity has been called into question as a performance - in recent history high profile feminist art exhibitions like Wack! and Global Feminisms have directly addressed this question. Artists including Hannah Wilke, Yoko Ono, Valie Export, Orlan, Cindy Sherman, Catherine Opie, and Marina Abramovic, among others have used their bodies to explore the constructs of femininity, while critical theorists like Judith Butler have posed the question of the societal reinforcement of gender through language. In our society, the male is often taken as the standard for "nor­mal," when this identity is just as performed as any other. I'm Your Man questions the idea that the white male is the norm by bringing to light his place of privilege, and therefore subjective perspectives, expectations, and advantages that are at­tached to the male body. This exhibition is a collection of artists that investigate masculinity as performance. They look at interpretations of masculinity in relation to class, labor, physical fitness, and race. Through the use of the grotesque, humor, masking, and gaming, they reveal moments of failed masculinity and place into question the assumed privileged status of the dominant gender Ultimately, all of the works explore construction of male identity.