One Of The Boys (Red Front) shows a model wearing a gown made from the NBA jersey of Toronto Raptors player Vince Carter. The jersey has been attached to a billowing skirt and is tied on the sides with adjustable seams to fit a range of body types.

This archival print is part of a multimedia series of artworks also titled One of the Boys, by African Canadian artist Esmaa Mohamoud that blends elements of hyper-masculinity with elements of hyper-femininity to make a layered statement about representations within professional sports. The series manifests variously as wearable gown sculptures that are either worn by models or displayed in a gallery, photographs of those models wearing the gowns, and installations that sometimes include all three, the photographs, the gowns, and models wearing some of the gowns.

Mohamoud is commenting on several aspects of how bodies, and in particular Black bodies, are represented within the world of sports, including: how vulnerability and fragility are discouraged; how women’s bodies are marginalized or hyper-sexualized; and how athletes are locked into an insidiously objectified and glamorized structure of what Mohamoud describes as “neo-slavery.”