SAN FRANCISCO — “Really, though, Indians are good at basketball because a basketball has never been just a basketball — It will always be a slick, bright bullet we can sling from the 3-point arc with 5 seconds left on a clock in the year 1492.” These lines from Natalie Diaz’s “Ten Reasons Indians Are Good At Basketball” (2020) suggest that we might still find beauty, meaning, and flickers of freedom within civilizational ruin in the specter of sport. The full poem is one of the many texts that accompanies Get in the Game at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and offers one way of navigating the exhibition. The more than 70 artists don’t simply track or divulge the violences and pleasures in the game, but induce transformative experiences in their sculpture, embroidery, sound, video, and still photography through strategies of invention and refusal. The exhibition, like the field or the racetrack, is not only a structure but an axis on which themes such as gender, everyday and superhuman prowess, value, controlled violence and pain, and the business of sport spin outward.
Many of the works in Get in the Game explore or challenge sport’s gendered division, transcending the tired notions of “inclusion” and “exclusion.” Cara Erskine’s “Everybody, Everybody” (2017–18) critiques misogynist news coverage of the Canadian women’s Olympic hockey team in 2010, during which sports media deemed their raucous celebrations unladylike, by placing the party — one teammate dousing another with champagne, their faces close enough to be a single body — at the center of her euphoric painting. Mark Bradford’s “Practice” (2003), a video loop of himself in an elaborate purple and yellow hoop-dress that satirizes the Lakers jersey, subverts stereotypes of masculinity, including its requirement of athletic ability, in the way the elegance of his body transcends its clumsy movements. And Betsy Odom’s hand-sculpted “Bulldog 30” (2009), a set of leather shoulder pads, include the artist’s own initials, “B.O,” spinning a self-deprecating gesture into a decorative one and blurring the boundary between sport, often coded as masculine, and sportswear, historically coded as feminine.
In visual dialogue with Diaz’s poem, Grace Rosario Perkins’s “They Thought You Would Be Taller” (2024) meditates on the possibilities of basketball as a form of language. In the painting, Rosario honors her lineage of fandom — and the possibilities of sport as a conduit of freedom — through her grandmother, scrambling and layering her grandmother’s quotes and Spurs T-shirt along with her own self-portrait as a girl with natural elements like milk thistle, dandelion, and boldo leaf from her parents’ land. These and other works pulsate with rhythmic choreography that recalls basketball itself: symbols as bodies moving, pushing up against, and being moved by others around them.
Ashley Teamer also invokes a personal female lineage to Basketball with “WNBA History, Book I,” (2024), which highlights the ingenuity of her grandmother, who started a team at Dillard University against the backdrop of Title IX, in order to insert personhood into the political economy of the gendered athlete in sports. The large-scale work employs archival photographs of mostly Black women from the early years of the WNBA as trading cards, with “pillars” of the game at the center, such as player A’ja Wilson (Aces) beside her coach (and then-Liberty player) Becky Hammon, and Layisha Claredon, the first openly non-binary player in the WNBA. As in basketball itself, in which there are thousands of ways to score a point, she suggests an alternative archive: the quilt-as-book becomes a metaphorical vessel that can become a place of safekeeping for the subjects, placing value on spaces where Black women and non-binary players can dwell in their personhood, rather than as currency between teams or as collectible cards.
What comes after physical “perfection”? Artists like Holly Bass and Savanah Leaf lay bare the tension between physical virtuosity and controlled violence. Taking seriously the exhaustion and objectification of the female athlete, they platform personhood by suggesting that the body can be an instrument for art-making. Holly Bass’s photograph “NWBA (jordan)” (2o12) takes the objectification of the Black female body literally, suspending her own body two feet in the air, two basketballs hanging from her back as if part of her body. And in one video work by former Olympic volleyball player Leaf, her running routine is carefully monitored by the wires she’s hooked to, her body cloaked in dim light that illuminates its depths, her face wrought with vexation. The cropped, intimate gaze of the camera, which at times uncomfortably recalls an enclosure of captivity, keeps the viewer apprised but separate, inducing a feeling of culpability in the spectator-viewer.
Alejandra Carles-Tolra’s large-format photographs “Bruises Legs and Sweat” (2013–15) take up the theme of gendered vulnerability in depicting not only the strength of women’s college rugby players, but also their interior worlds. In four panels of closely cropped shots, the players are classically beautiful, but not in the pose of a classic “feminine” athletic beauty. Refusing the privileged god’s-eye view, the camera plunges into the scrum: One player, a “tighthead,” peeks between two cropped players, their hand wrapped around teammates’ thighs, freezing a split-second view so that we may read her expression.
Particularly striking, yet easily missed is Roxana Drexler’s “Death of Benny “Kid” Paret” (1963), which deals with gender through her own mode of care. In six sequences, her painting recovers the story of the death of boxer Benny Paret: Drexler tracks the controlled brutalization of the athlete’s body while shielding it from full view. Staging the controlled violence of both the ring and the artwork, she suggests that there is value in honoring the humanity of athletes through ambiguity and privacy.
Taken together, these artists animate new scripts for both art-making and sport, positing their languages of rhythmic choreography as sites of possibility and reclamation. The codes of “the game” are never finished products, they suggest, but active materials for making a future fixed not in the boundaries of a single body, but a messy collective. To engage in these works is to ask us, the viewers, to locate ourselves in the small explosions and dialogues between pleasure and pain, secrecy and exhibition, and sites of collective freedom.
Get in the Game: Sports, Art, Culture continues at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (151 3rd Street, San Francisco) through February 18.
