Exhibition - Rough Man's Playground

Welcome to Rough Man’s Playground, an exhibition-playspace inviting visitors to dream new masculinities for collectively attuned futures.

Artists Micah Lockman-Fine and Lu Donovan beckon viewers towards revisiting childhood fantasy through collaborative fabric collage; storming through teenage identity exploration with mirrored self-reflection; and sharing intimacy and impulse using denim-tethered interreliance. With interactive installations webbing game play, movement exercise, costume and video, this dreamscaped playground suspends viewers in a world where a million masculinities dance, kiss, trip, falter, rest, and tease one another, forming integrated selves which slink beyond the exhibition’s walls.

Thank you to artist-contributors:
Shannon Brooks
Ami Glazer
Caroline Udell
Trinity Dahmus
Grace Fan
Ilya Blender
George Dorsey III

Micah Lockman-Fine is a designer, researcher and artist. He designs progressive speculative futures through installation, curation, performance, runway, garment design, biodesign, game play and technology. He has co-curated exhibitions for the MOMA BioDesign Summit and the Schuylkill Center; through his brand Stoop Kids, he has featured work in the Numinous Mag Surrealism Show, Introspective Innovations NYFW, Stitch Fashion Show, William Way Galleries, Clay Studio, and Bob Jackson Gallery. He is currently receiving his Master of Science in Design Research at Drexel University.

Lu Donovan is a dance maker whose work is grounded in an improvisational practice that seeks imaginative ways of relating to one’s own body in the context of our entropic world. His work prioritizes pleasure and researches strategies of queer-ing, or, widening options for how something can exist, be used, be seen, and be held. Lu has produced, directed, and facilitated dance performances and workshops in Philadelphia since 2018.
Lockman-Fine and Donovan co-directed Dream Sweet, Rough Man for the 2023 Fringe and Cannonball Festivals, collaboratively imagining and uplifting joyful, embodied masculinity. Rough Man’s Playground, the second iteration of this research, is supported by the Leeway Art and Change Grant.

Photo by Grace Fan, Co-directed by Lu Donovan and Micah Lockman-Fine
Dream Sweet, Rough Man, 2023

Alt text: Two pairs of people each reach toward each other. The pair in the foreground is dressed in denim and the pair in the background is in the shadows. There is a blue wash over the whole image and overlaying the photo is a net made of denim strips.