Taken for the Team

Esmaa Mohamoud’s installations capture the way professional sports prof it from Black bodies

- CONNOR GAREL

IT IS OFTEN ASSUMED by people who should know better that Esmaa Mohamoud is a man. On the opening days of the artist’s exhibitions, which typically focus on the troubled relationship between professional sports and Black masculinity, those dizzied patrons will materialize, uninformed, to search determinedly for the Man Behind the Work. What happens instead is that they discover twenty-eight-year-old Mohamoud and often say something like, “Oh! You’re a woman.” Nonplussed reactions don’t surprise her. “It’s probably the subject matter,” she tells me one April afternoon, visibly amused. “The work reads as masculine; I have lots of masculine energy.”

Sometimes a gallery visitor will ask whether she’s the artist and she’ll say no, point out some poor unsuspecting man flitting about the crowd, and say it’s him, he’s Esmaa Mohamoud —  partly because she’s “super awkward and shy” but also because, despite her diffidence, she has a thing for the performative gesture. Like American artist Richard Serra, one of her artistic forebears, she creates installations with a certain grandeur: sculptures with gravity that engage the viewer’s body and force them to walk around the works rather than past them. This explains their notably large scale and her proclivity for industrial materials. (She is, for example, currently working on a field of 500 “indestructible” black dandelions that could probably fill a small bedroom; she sometimes tracks the progression of the installation on Instagram.)