'Get in the Game' exhibition explores connections between art and sports

Amna Nawaz:

The art of sports and sports as art. Two worlds collide and complement each other in an exhibition now traveling the country as the Winter Olympics starts soon.

Senior arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown had a chance to take it all in for our arts and culture series, Canvas.

Jeffrey Brown:

It's the rare museum exhibition where visitors can get in the game themselves.

And that's the name of an exhibition put together by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and now at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, exploring the intersection of sports and American life, paintings and other traditional art forms, fashion and design, even sports equipment, fishing rods, surfboards, bicycles hung on gallery walls like sculptures.

One idea here, to bridge a perceived divide between two worlds, one that Crystal Bridges curator Laura Pratt felt herself.

Laura Pratt, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art: I came into this show thinking, oh, I'm not a sports person. And then I took a...

Jeffrey Brown:

You're not?

Laura Pratt:

Well, I thought that I was no sports person. As it turns out, I think I am. It touches so many parts of people's lives, and this is a -- really a way to make that connection and bring them in for closer conversations.

Jeffrey Brown:

There's the spectacle and effort, homages to key figures in sports history, such as Althea Gibson, also explorations of gender and race, as in Deborah Roberts' Red, White, and Blue, and Health and Violence, CTE brain scans drawn in charcoal by Shaun Leonardo.

Jennifer Dunlop Fletcher was one of the San Francisco MoMA co-curators.

Jennifer Dunlop Fletcher, San Francisco Museum of American Art curator: Throughout the development of the exhibition, we started to see so many more parallels than we thought possible between sports and art.

Derek Fordjour has a beautiful painting in the exhibition called Open Swim. And that was really about the limited hours that Black citizens had to the public pool, one hour a day versus seven hours a day. Many of the artists both note a personal connection to sports, as well as just seeing a cultural aspect, where sports are permeating so many different aspects of contemporary culture.

Jeffrey Brown:

There's a different kind of battle in Hank Willis Thomas' quilt of team jerseys, a take off of Picasso's famous anti-war painting Guernica.

Indigenous artist Jeffrey Gibson embellishes a punching bag with beads and Native American regalia in a work titled What We Want, What We Need.

A number of the artists in the exhibition have themselves also been competitive athletes. One is Savanah Leaf, a star collegiate professional and Olympian volleyball player who's now a film director and video artist, with a work here titled Run. To her, connecting art and sports comes naturally.

Savanah Leaf, Artist:

From the creation and the intuitiveness of being an artist, what it's like to be on the court as a volleyball player, it's like very much you have to be physically present in the moment while also reacting and responding to all the problems that unfold. And I think that feels very much like being an artist.

There's things that aren't the same.

Jeffrey Brown:

You're not trying to win the artwork, are you?

Savanah Leaf:

Exactly. Like, you can't be competitive with -- in art, you can't be in the same way competitive with someone else. But the creation of a project can feel very similar at times.

Jeffrey Brown:

Leaf noted how the exhibition highlights the gains of women in a variety of ways.

Savanah Leaf:

Thinking about women not even being able to play sports for a while, and then, as society changes, also women have -- people are starting to invest now in female athletes a lot more than they ever did before. And so you can kind of see that in parallels. And I think the art is kind of like a greater reflection on that and allows us to kind of step back and analyze all of those shifts and changes.

Jeffrey Brown:

Crystal Bridges curator Laura Pratt brought us to an athlete artist of an earlier time, Ernie Barnes, a child of the segregated south who became a professional football player and successful artist. His teammates called him Big Rembrandt.

Laura Pratt:

Ernie Barnes is such a perfect example of the integration of art and athletics. And he was born in such a pivotal time in both cultural and sports history. He was able to get that real-life experience, but he was so dedicated to his craft as an artist and taking those experiences and translating it into his paintings.

Jeffrey Brown:

There are lighter moments here, including Jean Shin's Altered Trophies Everyday Moments, awards given for sewing, pushing a stroller, a trophy for everyone, and creating an exhibition for everyone was also a key part of this.

Laura Pratt:

The hope is that we attract more people in, people who thought that they would never find something relevant in a museum and get them to hear for a show that shows there's actually a lot in common between these areas.

Jeffrey Brown:

So some of this is about bringing more new people into a museum?

Laura Pratt:

Yes, absolutely, so thinking about people who've never been in our museum, but also there's also an opportunity for all of our art-loving guests to experience art in new ways and with topics that they might not have thought of.

Jeffrey Brown:

Taking the art, the issues and ideas, and on an elongated foosball table created by Maurizio Cattelan, see if you too can score a goal. Get in the Game moves to the Perez Art Museum in Miami in mid-March.

For the "PBS News Hour," I'm Jeffrey Brown at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas.