New Arrivals 2021 from August 30 to October 16, 2021 at the STAMP Gallery | University of Maryland, College Park | written by Fiona Yang

Akea Brionne Brown’s All American Boys is a part of her series “A Brown Millennial” (2020), an exploration of “what it means to exist as a young, black, American woman in a time where everything feels uncertain.” The rest of the series focuses on Brown’s experiences with white American femininity; All American Boys stands out as the single piece that deals with masculinity. 

In All American Boys, Brown drapes herself in mass-produced cloth, patterned with stereotypical images of cowboys. The mass-production of those images parallels the commodification of the “Wild West” narrative. President Theodore Roosevelt and contemporary figures such as James Cox and Joseph McCoy played a large part in romanticizing the role of cowboys on the frontier, leading to the enormous popularity of Wild West shows and rodeos, Western films, and the enduring concept of the “Wild West” in TV shows, novels, comics, and video games. 

Westerns—recognized to be the most popular Hollywood film genre from the 1900s to the 1960s—descend narratively from “knight-errants” of European literature and poetry. Knight-errants, much like the gunslingers of Westerns, are lone male figures, bound by chivalry and codes of honor, exacting their personal conceptions of justice and fairness. Both are also inherently masculine genres. The men of Westerns are “real men”—stoic, charismatic with women, occasionally violent, secure in their masculinity. 

All American Boys takes these tenets of Western masculinity and raises them to absurd heights. There’s barely any “cowboy” upon close examination—just white men, adorned with wide-brimmed hats, bootcut jeans, and other accoutrements. If Westerns serve to affirm masculinity, the cowboy in All American Boys parodies it. Conventionally attractive white men, shirtless, posed to show off their chiseled bodies—rather than emphasizing their masculinity, this portrayal undercuts it by posing the men for a titillating female audience. Even the name evokes a sense of sarcasm—“All American Boys,” instead of “All American Men,” derides this uniquely American conception of masculinity. Westerns are a power fantasy. Conversely, the cowboys on the cloth are objects of desire, stripping them of agency and interiority. 

The cowboys’ objectification is heightened by Brown’s self-portrait, which stands in stark contrast to the bare-chested men. The cloth is wrapped over the majority of her figure, implying feminine modesty. Her lips are glossed, and the only glimpse the viewer gets of her collarbone and shoulder implies that she is shirtless. These aspects lend coy sexuality and vulnerability to the portrait. Despite this, Brown stares directly at the viewer, challenging them to confront the implications of her surrounding background. She inserts herself directly into a parody of whiteness and masculinity, undeniably real and defiant. As a Black woman, she serves as a reminder of historical context, grounding these images firmly in reality. 

The genre of Westerns are inextricably linked to whiteness. Protagonists in Westerns perform violent, extrajudicial acts valorized by the narrative. In fact, their acts are often portrayed as necessary: unachievable through judicial means, because of bureaucracy, corruption, and moral weakness. Meanwhile, historical Black and Indigenous responses to injustice were demeaned and minimized. Indigenous attempts to defend their lands were portrayed as hostile attacks on white settlers. Black cowboys—which historians estimate made up to 25% of the Texan cowboy population—were nominally equal to white cowboys. The dangerous, difficult work of cattle herding necessarily created respect and camaraderie. But they were still given harder, more dangerous tasks on the trail, expected to take on additional duties such as cooking and performing, and were turned away from certain restaurants and housing in the towns they passed through. Even today, it’s clear whose anger is legitimized and whose is demonized: white backlash to cultural change got Trump elected to the White House, while Black Lives Matter has been deemed politically corrosive outside a small circle of progressive lawmakers.

All American Boys is a commentary on the absence of Black cowboys in our narratives of the Wild West, which has historically enforced white male power structures. In All American Boys, Brown looks us directly in the eye and questions our conceptions of masculinity, of whiteness, of the Wild West. The conclusion she reaches is inevitable: that white male masculinity is untenable, an exaggerated performance, and deeply intertwined with revisionist whitewashed histories. 

Akea Brionne Brown’s work is included in the CAPP 2021 New Arrivals at The Stamp Gallery of the University of Maryland, College Park, from August 30 to October 16, 2021.

For more information on Akea Brionne Brown, visit https://www.akeabrown.com/.
For more information on New Arrivals 2021 and related events, visit https://thestamp.umd.edu/stamp_gallery

Further Reading

• Cowboy Masculinities: Relationality and Rural Identity
• “In All Truthfulness As I Remember It”: Deciphering Myth and Masculinity in Cowboy Memoirs
• Elisa Bordin, Masculinity and Westerns: Regenerations at the Turn of the New Millennium
• “Western” Notions of Justice: Legal Outsiders in American Cinema
• The Lesser-Known History of African-American Cowboys
• Honoring African American Contributions: African American Cowboys on the Western Frontier
• Black Lives Matter thought they had Washington’s ear. Now they feel shut out.