What is it about Baseball that makes it so nostalgic? A game that parents encourage their offspring to play for a couple of seasons, it is then forever relegated to childhood. Does its complex relationship with shaping American masculinity bleed into the understanding of our past? Or is it so essential to our cultural makeup (after all, it is “America’s Pastime”) that it becomes an inescapable part of our collective memory? Artists Aaron Cowan and CB Adams attempt to answer these questions. 

Aaron Cowan

My work exists as memorials for boys and men who were forced to fit into a specific patriarchal masculinity, and were not allowed to explore their true selves and interests. Mining my own baseball experiences when I was a kid and remembering the boys who didn’t want to be there, forced by their parents, picking flowers in the outfield. If they had been allowed to explore that interest nor forced into an activity perhaps we would have more gardeners, more happy and developed men in our society.

Aaron Cowan’s work is centralized around the masculine experience of growing up white and male in America, subverting and co-opting its culture to upend and point out the ridiculousness of “being a man.” Cowan speaks to power using its own language, substituting toxicity with flowers. 

CB Adams

The premise for “My Life In A Dome” is simple. I am preserving and interpreting my childhood through the boxes and bins of  toys, books, clothing and other ephemera that my parents saved and stored for decades in their basement. My parents literally saved my childhood, as if in amber, including my potty training chair.

CB Adams, MFA, is a writer-photographer based in the Greater St. Louis area. In both his published literary short fiction and exhibited photography, he is a storyteller with a distinct Southern inflection.