HEADMASTER NO. 10
THE SPORTS ISSUE
Headmaster is the art magazine for man-lovers. The magazine's editors write assignments for artists, who then create original projects for each issue. Headmaster No. 10: The Sports Issue explores a Venn diagram of sport, queerness, and art. The issue features original projects by twelve artists and artist duos who have explored sports-related topics including locker rooms, cheerleading, pageantry and performance, Muscular Christianity, the men’s rhythmic gymnastics floor program, problematic gay wrestler Pat Patterson, and the Presidential Physical Fitness Test.
Click here to read the Issue No. 10 Editors’ Letter.
HEADMASTER NO. 10 FEATURES ORIGINAL PROJECTS BY:
Erma Fiend
Apolo Gomez
Hilary Harkness & Ara Tucker
The Huxleys
Wayne Koestenbaum
Victor Luque
Sam Nehila
Tony Orrico & Christopher-Rasheem McMillan
Matthew Papa
Laurent Pellissier
Deb Sokolow
Zhidong Zhang
Headmaster No. 10 was supported by:
The City of Providence
Department of Art, Culture + Tourism
H E A D M A S T E R NO. 10 / C O N T R I B U T O R S
ERMA FIEND
ASSIGNMENT: The Story of Headmaster: Chapter 10
Erma Fiend (aka Lee) is a director of surreal stop motion animation. Fiend is known for documenting his gender transition over the years in hundreds of Escheresque stop motion self portrait loops, which play like Möbius strips in GIF form. Erma Fiend originals have been commissioned by Adult Swim, Vice TV, Hulu, Spotify, Trolli, CBC, Giphy, Vans, and Meow Wolf. In addition to performing in his work, Fiend works professionally as a drag king named Sweaty Eddie, featured on NYC stages such as Sasha Velour's NightGowns and infamous late night acts at The Box NYC.
APOLO GOMEZ
ASSIGNMENT: Cheerleading
Apolo Gomez was born in Austin, TX, and is a queer Chicanx visual artist based out of Albuquerque, New Mexico. After a bout with lymphoma, he picked up his first camera and started documenting his friends and lovers. Through photography, painting, and installation, his interdisciplinary practice explores the complex multiplicity of personhood, queerness, desire, and his latinx identity.
His work has been exhibited at the Colorado Photographic Arts Center (Denver, CO); 516 Arts (Albuquerque, NM); Zona Maco (CDMX, Mexico); and the National Hispanic Cultural Center Art Museum (Albuquerque, NM). His work has been published in I-D Magazine, De Groene Amsterdammer Viscose Journal, and Elephant Magazine.
HILARY HARKNESS &
ARA TUCKER
ASSIGNMENT: The Presidential Fitness Test
Hilary Harkness is an artist known for her irreverent, provocative and meticulously crafted paintings. Harkness employs historic world events and art history as jumping off points from which to explore power dynamics and struggles through an intersectional lens. The worlds that unfold on Harkness’s canvases teem with the inescapable human foibles that plague each of us.
Ara Tucker is an artist storyteller whose practice focuses on the intersection of race, class, gender, sexual orientation as well as intergenerational memory and trauma. She applies humor in her depictions of the ways these intersections warp daily life.
THE HUXLEYS
ASSIGNMENT: Australian Rules Football
Will and Garrett Huxley are Melbourne-based collaborative performance and visual artists. The Huxleys are a dynamic duo of cataclysmic proportion who present camp spectacle and disco-enthused wizardry across the visual art, performance and entertainment sectors. Their photography and performance art traverses the classifications of costume, film and recording. A visual assault of sparkle, surrealism and the absurd, The Huxleys saturate their practice and projects with a glamorous, androgynous freedom which sets out to bring some escapism and magic to everyday life.
Since 2014 The Huxleys have performed, exhibited and participated in numerous exhibitions, projects and events in Australia, and internationally in London, Berlin, Moscow, New York and Hong Kong. Solo presentations, performances and commissions include the Melbourne International Arts Festival; Melbourne Fashion Week; Sydney Contemporary; Hong Kong Design Week; and Heide Museum of Modern Art. The Huxleys first came to prominence during the early years of MONA FOMA and Dark Mofo in Tasmania. The Huxleys have been finalists in the National Portrait Prize in both 2022 and 2023 and finalists in Bowness Prize 2022.
WAYNE KOESTENBAUM
ASSIGNMENT: The Story of Headmaster, Chapter 10
Wayne Koestenbaum—poet, critic, fiction-writer, artist, filmmaker—has published over twenty books, including Ultramarine, The Cheerful Scapegoat, Figure It Out, Camp Marmalade, My 1980s & Other Essays, Humiliation, Hotel Theory, Circus, Andy Warhol, Jackie Under My Skin, and The Queen’s Throat (nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award). His newest book, Stubble Archipelago, was released by Semiotext(e) in March 2024. Recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, and a Whiting Award, he is a Distinguished Professor of English, French, and Comparative Literature at the CUNY Graduate Center.
Photo by Jan Rattia
VICTOR LUQUE
ASSIGNMENT: Anatomical Accuracy
Victor Luque is a Spanish visual artist based in Berlin. His work, while essentially documentary, uses elements of the autobiographical and explores themes of desire, sexuality and queer identity, influenced by painting, sculpture and cinema. In exploring the landscape of his immediate reality, he uncovers a sense of something magical in the mundane, deifies his human subjects, and works to reveal the beauty in unexpected places and the otherness.
He is Co-founder and artistic director of the periodical publication Schmutzig & Mutig.
SAM NEHILA
ASSIGNMENT: Locker Rooms
Sam Nehila wears many hats in the art world of Providence, RI. He is a tour guide for Gallery Night Providence, a museum educator for K-12 student visits at the RISD Museum, and working on his personal practice of printing stone lithographs in his Providence studio. He received a BA in Art History and a minor in Printmaking from Rhode Island College, and a MA in the History of Art and Architecture from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is a co-organizer of PVDPrintmakers (@pvdprintmakers), an online and in-person community group working to support and connect printmakers across Rhode Island.
TONY ORRICO & CHRISTOPHER-RASHEEM MCMILLAN
ASSIGNMENT: Pageantry & Performance
Christopher-Rasheem McMillan is a versatile artist, choreographer, and scholar who is an Assistant Professor of Dance Theory and Practice, as well as Gender, Women's, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Iowa. McMillan's research explores choreography in an expanded field, using experimental practices and creative processes in various formats and expressions. He employs video, performance, photography, and oral storytelling to investigate themes of race, memory, queer desire, religion, and personal and public mythology.
Tony Orrico is a visual and performing artist exploring the realms of physical and mental endurance, somatic movement, trace, memory, and social aesthetics. Orrico is an Assistant Professor of Sculpture, Intermedia, and Dance at the University of Iowa. Orrico’s record of performances and exhibitions spans five continents with works collected by Muzeum Susch (Switzerland), Kablanc/Fundación Otazu (Spain), Bergmeier/Kunstsaele (Germany), Colección Ca.Sa (Chile), The National Academy of Sciences (DC), and Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo (Mexico), among others.
MATTHEW PAPA
ASSIGNMENT: Muscular Christianity
Matthew Papa is a New York-based artist working primarily in photography. He has an MFA in Advanced Photographic Studies from ICP/Bard College and a BA in Philosophy from University of Michigan. His undergraduate study of philosophy informs his artistic practice and he’s interested in photography’s ability to complicate meaning. Desire and the body are often subjects in his work because our ideas around them are rife with conflict. He has shown in numerous group exhibitions in New York City, Los Angeles, Berlin, Mexico City, Washington, D.C., and Detroit, and his work has been featured in Der Greif, The Fader and W Magazine.
LAURENT PELLISSIER
ASSIGNMENT: Rhythmic Gymastics
Laurent Pellissier is an artist born in Aosta, Italy, living and working in Berlin. Populated by queer and supernatural creatures, his paintings and sculptures evoke the night, the city, desire, and the forest. Experimenting with variance and seriality, he often uses techniques and materials discovered in the naïveté of his childhood: papier-mâché, modeling clay, linocuts, or pencil drawings. His works make unruly references to German Expressionism, Japanese cartoons, and 80s pornography alike – swinging from humor to horror, melancholy to sensuality, kawaii to the grotesque.
DEB SOKOLOW
ASSIGNMENT: Pat Patterson
Deb Sokolow is an artist whose semi-fictitious drawings speculate both comically and critically on a number of subjects including architecture, social engineering, world leaders and intelligence organizations. Her work has been included in the 4th Athens Biennale (Athens, Greece), the 5th Chicago Architecture Biennial and in exhibitions at Museum für Gegenwartskunst (Siegen, Germany), Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven, Netherlands), Drawing Center (New York), Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (Washington, D.C.) and Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art (Hartford). Sokolow’s drawings have appeared in BOMB Magazine, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s Best American Comics and Phaidon’s Vitamin D2. Sokolow is based in Chicago.
ZHIDONG ZHANG
ASSIGNMENT: Artificial Turf
Zhidong Zhang is an artist, educator, and plant lover. Their practice explores social, political, cultural, and sexual relationships among the institution, the body, and modes of embodiment. Working primarily with photography, text, and installation, their work negotiates and creates narratives where image-making becomes a form of history-making. Zhang’s practice and process invite alternative, autonomous modes of identity construction through/by/via metabolizing bodies that are often overlooked, eroticized, or politicized.
Zhang: Website