The basketball court isn't entirely visible from Biscayne, but every time I drive by, I do a little, you know, trying to see what I can see.

And so sometimes I'll pull in just to watch who's playing.

My name is Najja Moon and I'm an artist and a basketball player.

I'm grateful that an organization that I really admire reached out to Project Backboard.

And they have been approached with opportunity with partners based in Miami to execute a basketball court mural and asked if I'd be interested in participating.

So Bigface Coffee, The Salty Donut, JDS sports were wanting to fund a court in Miami.

And so the process kind of rolled on from there.

I guess for me, I was trying to think about the ways that this kind of coalition of people came together, what we had in common.

And then from there just kind of started making sketches.

Maybe a dozen sketches or so, and then I started to collage them in the computer.

And one of the reoccurring themes for me that kept coming up was uncommon.

And I was thinking about how atypical it is for me to have played basketball all my life and to now be a working artist.

I was thinking about Jimmy Butler's route to the NBA and how unorthodox that was.

And so as I'm thinking about the gestural mark making that shows up in my work a lot, I was curious how those marks could be uncommon suggestions for how to navigate the court.

If a basketball court is a drawing that promotes choreography, how could I contribute to that?

And so that was kind of the thought process in making it work.

Thinking about the ways that people are responding in real time on the court, I'm starting to see the drawing also as some kind of abstracted shot chart.

People are kind of picking a dot to shoot from or a section based on a color.

Yeah, but I'm excited to see what else comes from that.

I'm looking forward to seeing more scuff marks on the painting.

You know, adding more marks to the drawing.

It's like, it's becoming a kind of collaborative piece in that way.

I think I have a long history or resume of, you know, working in teams to keep the basketball metaphors going, you know?

I'm not a ball hog.

So this was a beautiful collaborative experience.

I mean, I guess, if anything it encourages to continue working that way and affirms the ways in which I had already been working.

I played basketball my whole life.

I played in college and after that I didn't really touch a ball.

I say, you know, when you don't have to do two a days anymore, you don't.

The last three years of my life story goes that, you know, I had gained a ton of weight during the pandemic and I wanted to look in the mirror and feel hot again.

I was like, I need to get in the gym.

And so what started as riding the bike and lifting weights slowly became doing a shooting workout, became playing three on three, half court, you know.

My knees are old.

And then when I felt good, I started playing full court five on five and all of a sudden I was like, oh, I play basketball.

That happened again, you know?

I think the foundation of my practice starts in a collaborative community- based way and I've done a lot of work with my drawing and connected to poetry.

I've collaborated with O Miami a bunch.

It's another organization I really enjoy.

And my work is starting to move more into the performance space where I'm making sound-based work that are translations of my drawings.

Yeah, there's like a bunch of different tentacles to my practice, but I think that there's also a lot of really great Miami based organizations that have helped push my practice.

When I think about, O Miami or Pioneer Winter Diaspora Vibes, those are all folks who have really encouraged, you know, my unorthodox way of exploring myself and my work.

One of the things that I explore in my mark making sometimes with all of the intersections of mark making is I'm thinking about how do I build a life where there is less separation?

You know, I don't want my work and leisure time to be different.

I would love for my life to just roll, everything to roll into each other.

And I think I spent a large chunk of my life separating from my experience as an athlete.

And so to get to this point where I'm making work that directly combines the two feels like I've arrived to a point that I wanna get to.

The install process took about a week.

Initially there was grinding and sanding, trying to clean up some of the divots on the court.

Then, you know, put the resurfacer down and then all the paint that you see is, you know, outdoor sport court paint.

The same thing you would paint a tennis court with.

The larger swaths of color are mostly done with large squeegees.

And then pretty much every mark, circle, line that you see was individually taped off and then painted.

So it was tedious.

We used like a gridding process.

Chalk grid lined the whole area to then kind of sketch, resketch out the drawing and taped them out.

We cranked it out in a week, one Saturday we kind of had a open volunteer day, so I had a bunch of friends come by and help as well.

People were visiting from the farmer's market being like, hey, what's going on over here?

So, you know, everybody had a hand in it.

I've gotten photos from folks that live in the condo over here, you know, getting aerial view pictures of the court while it's in process, folks sharing images of their kids playing here.

I'm grateful that it's a park that is used by people who live here and will continue to care for it.

This is a functional object, the basketball court, you know, it's to be used and that's probably the best part, as somebody who does play, you know, I'm excited to see the way people use it and add to it.