Troy Montes-Michie

Here Troy Montes-Michie appropriates two magazine pages featuring Black men, reworking them with drawn-on clothes and stitching. In so doing, he reclothes these figures but also places them behind bars-perhaps a reflection on the ways the Black male body is at once hypersexualized and over-policed.

Montes-Michie uses drawing and collage to comment on gender, race, sexuality, and nationality. A queer Black man from the border town of El Paso, Texas, he explains, “Stitching is a way to bring in the language of drawing. . . . And the stitch is an attempt to bring something together. The stitch can be really strong, but it also falls apart all the time. It’s almost returning to this idea of the boundary-the created boundary-that is the Rio Grande, separating El Paso from Ciudad Juárez, Mexico.”