Listen to the Excerpts from the Quiet Boy Interviews.

The exhibition includes an audio component, which allows you to listen in on interviews Elizabeth Bergeland conducted with her subjects about the themes of the show: manhood, their upbringing, friendships, insecurities, regrets, sexual experiences, and what it means to be a “good man”.

Bergeland took up the subject of masculinity in her painting practice after observing her young son beginning to adopt archetypal male traits around his friends: a resistance toward crying, fear of being seen as sensitive, avoidance of more “feminine” colors or activities. By interviewing and painting the men in this series of portraits, she realized that there was so much left out of the story of the American man's experience; men have money, power, and prestige, but they are often barred from intimate relationships and emotional honesty, saddled with the pressure to provide and constantly prove their masculinity. Quiet Boy takes its title from a poem by Stephen Kampa about the early social pressures boys feel to embrace and exhibit masculine traits or else risk isolation. Through these works, Bergeland explores personal and universal questions around raising children within a patriarchal society and how we may individually and collectively broaden society’s ideas around masculinity.