Pass through a stadium tunnel to the roar of a crowd usually reserved for beloved sports teams on game day. When you emerge, Hank Willis Thomas’s masterful Guernica (2016), made from recycled sports jerseys and modeled after the 1937 Pablo Picasso painting of the same name, looms large.
Beyond it awaits an expansive array of works referencing baseball, basketball, e-sports and gaming, football, surfing, skating, and more. It’s a museum entry unlike any other you may have experienced, but Get in the Game: Sports, Art, Culture is not your typical exhibition.
Opening October 19 and spanning 15,000 square feet of the museum, Get in the Game spotlights the influence of sports on contemporary culture. Athletic competition has inspired many contemporary artists to create works responding to the game’s emotional drama, the fan’s enthusiasm, the athlete’s discipline, and the implicit and explicit codes governing how games are played and who gets to play them. The exhibition brings together over 100 works of art, design, interactive installations, and media related to the world of sports, including athletic fashion and gear, Formula 1 race car steering wheels, and a display of surfboards (this is a California show, after all).
“Sports is a great connector, and tangentially has broadened conversation on several related topics, such as labor, class, race, gender, sexuality, and physical and mental health,” says Jennifer Dunlop Fletcher, Helen Hilton Raiser Curator of Architecture and Design, who co-curated the exhibition alongside Katy Siegel, research director, special program initiatives, and Seph Rodney, independent curator and writer.
Site-specific installations and playable artworks, like Gabriel Orozco’s Ping Pond Table (1998), which recreates a ping pong table into the shape of a lotus flower with water lilies and a pond in place of a net, invite visitors literally into the game. The exhibition layout does not have a beginning or end; visitors “choose their own adventure” through the paintings, sculptures, films, and design objects activating the galleries.
In addition, SFMOMA is commissioning new installations by cartoonist Gene Luen Yang, contemporary artist and educator Jenifer K Wofford, and abstract artist David Huffman, as part of the museum’s Bay Area Walls series. Each artist’s work considers a historical moment in sports (learn more about Yang’s basketball-focused mural on pages 20–21).
Explore highlights organized around the presentation’s five themes: Winning and Losing; A Fan’s Life; Breaking Records, Breaking Rules; Field of Play; and Mind and Body.
WINNING AND LOSING
Race day medals, altars of trophies and ribbons . . . winning is exhilarating for both players and spectators. This first gallery emphasizes the competitive spirit of the game that drives athletes to push their bodies and minds to the absolute limit. These works navigate the social and economic pressure to win, the emotional highs and lows, and the political implications of who gets picked to compete.
Against this backdrop, Cary Leibowitz’s Untitled Installation (gathered for SFMOMA) (1991–2024) displays what looks like a collection of sports souvenirs, with colorful pennants, stuffed bears, baseball bats, and other memorabilia. A deeper look reveals slogans and commentary that explore Leibowitz’s experience growing up gay and Jewish in suburban America. Pennants with unexpected messages like “Go Sadness” and an award for “11th Place Every Single Thing” provide a stark contrast to the cult of winning and are a poignant reminder that for someone to win, someone else must lose.
A FAN’S LIFE
Turning attention to the fans who love the game, this section focuses on the collective experience and dramatic rollercoaster that is fandom. From children who grow up idolizing Stephen Curry or Simone Biles, to adults who watch every game of their home team, fans are a crucial part of sports. After all, is a win really a win if there’s no one to applaud or do the wave?
Visitors can experience firsthand the glory of victory and the agony of defeat with Maurizio Cattelan’s custom foosball table Stadium (1991). In this interactive work, 22 players (two teams of 11, just like a typical soccer match) can face off to see who is the greatest of all time — or, at least, who is the greatest within the realm of SFMOMA foosball.
BREAKING RECORDS, BREAKING RULES
Works in this section examine moments of social and political disruption, changes to existing rules, and athletes who have transformed the game. It celebrates athlete as activist, as captured in Tavares Strachan’s Althea and Althea (2019), a tribute to Althea Gibson, the first Black American to win a Grand Slam tennis tournament, and Robert Pruitt’s painting Venus Williams, Double Portrait (2022), featuring another barrier-breaking athlete who has been instrumental in fostering diversity in tennis and women’s sports. Kota Ezawa’s video National Anthem (2018), on view on Floor 2, relives the cultural flashpoint of former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick taking a knee during The Star-Spangled Banner to protest systemic racism and police brutality.
Portraits of some of history’s greatest athletes, such as basketball player Kobe Bryant and swimmer Diana Nyad, recognize record-breaking performances that established new heights in sports. For some, being told you can’t do something provides the motivation to keep trying. In the video Practice (2003), artist Mark Bradford wears a billowing hoop skirt attached to the jersey of his home team — the Los Angeles Lakers — and films himself playing basketball on an especially windy day. Bradford struggles and falls but keeps getting up, an experience he later said was “about roadblocks on every level: cultural, gender, racial. Regardless that they’re there, it is important to continue.”
FIELD OF PLAY
With an eye towards spaces, places, and governance, this section examines where and how games are played. An evolution-focused look at design demonstrates how innovations in equipment like surfboards, and inventions like racing wheelchairs and prosthetic running legs, have revolutionized sports and made them more accessible. Exhibition works also nod to nature as a playing field (especially for surfers, snowboarders, and the like).
The influence of skateboarding in art, fashion, and culture is a thread running throughout the exhibition. A monumental Martin Wong painting called Sweet Enuff (1987–88) depicts two young skateboarders on the Lower East Side of New York City. The skateboarders are encircled by barbed wire fencing, tall brick buildings, and a constellation of astrological and sign-language symbols, raising questions about the politics of space and how sports promote inclusion and exclusion. Meanwhile, Unity through Skateboarding, an exhibition presented alongside Get in the Game, is guest curated by Jeffrey Cheung and Gabriel Ramirez, artists and founders of the Oakland-based queer collective Unity, which introduces participants to skateboarding and art-making. Their Floor 2 exhibition focuses on the history of LGBTQ+, BIPOC, and women skateboarders and allies.
MIND AND BODY
The sky-high expectations and pressures associated with being a professional athlete can take a toll, both physically and mentally. This gallery pulls back the curtain on some of the darker aspects of being an athlete, for instance, displaying Shaun Leonardo’s drawings of CTE scans used to diagnose head injuries.
In Zidane, a 21st century portrait (2006), artists Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno document superstar footballer Zinedine Zidane in real time during a 2005 match, capturing multiple angles from 17 cameras positioned around the stadium. With a fixed, unwavering gaze on Zidane, the documentary film captures the intense attention on the player’s every move, along with the voyeuristic sense that someone is always watching. “You can hear the breathing, you can hear the crowd and the team, the coach yelling,” says Dunlop Fletcher. “It gives a more realistic sense of the many distractions an athlete contends with when playing in front of a crowd.”
Get in the Game pays homage to important sports moments throughout history while honoring the beauty, power, and mystery of human physicality. Works by artists like Emma Amos, Derek Fordjour, Jeffrey Gibson, Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi, and William Scott together unfold the many dimensions of sports, and no two experiences of the exhibition will be the same.
“The exhibition creates space for dynamic conversations about identity, physicality, passion, ambition, resilience, and so much more,” says Christopher Bedford, Helen and Charles Schwab Director of SFMOMA. “We welcome the public to experience this unique opportunity to look anew at the inspiring ways that sports, art, design, and culture intersect.”
Get in the Game: Sports, Art, Culture is on view October 19, 2024, through February 18, 2025, on Floor 7.
Lead support for Get in the Game: Sports, Art, Culture is provided by Bank of America.
Presenting support is provided by Dana and Bob Emery.
Major support is provided by KHR McNeely Family Fund and Mary Jo and Dick Kovacevich.
Significant support is provided by Mary Jane Elmore, Susan Karp and Paul Haahr, Jessica Moment, Nancy and Alan Schatzberg, and Anonymous.
Meaningful support is provided by Ethan Beard and Wayee Chu and Maryellen and Frank Herringer.