Esmaa Mohamoud Canadian, b. 1992

One Of The Boys (White) shows a model wearing a gown made from the NBA jersey of former Toronto Raptors player Tracy McGrady. 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. McGrady is the cousin of Toronto Raptor player Vince Carter, whose jersey Mohamoud has also used in her One of the Boys series, which 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 the photographs, the gowns, models wearing some of the gowns, and various other two and three-dimensional elements.

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.”