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This article is part of the Fine Arts & Exhibits special section on the art world stretching boundaries with new artists, new audiences and new technology.
“Guernica” hangs prominently on the seventh floor of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, its haphazard forms, oversized limbs and frenetic energy urging visitors to pause and contemplate what it all means.
Oh, this isn’t that “Guernica,” Picasso’s monochromatic antiwar painting of 1937 that hangs in the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid. This one is a collage-style quilt from 2016 by the Brooklyn artist Hank Willis Thomas, a colorful jumble of basketball jerseys bearing names and numbers of famous NBA players from different eras. Are they all teammates or adversaries? Are they meant to stir debate over who was the greatest? Or are they reminders that athletes fight for victory just as Picasso’s fallen soldier did? The viewer decides.
These are the kinds of questions that SFMOMA’s newest exhibition, “Get in the Game,” is meant to provoke. Using sports-related art and design objects to spark conversations of representation and purpose, it’s the museum’s largest show since its founding in 1935, taking up the entire seventh floor with related exhibits on floors below. Altogether, it’s an eclectic mix of more than 200 paintings, drawings, photographs, videos, athletic shoes, pennants, banners, trading cards, skateboards, computer game consoles, Formula 1 steering wheels, football helmets and a foosball game large enough for 22 players.
The exhibition opened Oct. 19 and runs through Feb. 18 before traveling to the Crystal Bridges Museum of Modern Art in Bentonville, Ark., and the Perez Museum in Miami.
While the through line is sport, items were selected to project broader concepts such as social justice, violence, gender, race, innovation and the joy of participating in the action or watching it. More than 70 creators are represented, some conveying their ideas through well-known figures like Michael Jordan, Muhammad Ali and Venus Williams, but others through the anonymous athletes who compete on neighborhood playgrounds.
For SFMOMA, the exhibition is part of a strategic shift from special shows built around a particular artist or movement to explorations of societal trends and contemporary issues. It was also conceived to attract people who have more experience with a sports event than a museum exhibition.
“To meet our mission, we need to expand our focus to embrace social subjects with deep meaning and resonance to a wide range of visitors,” said Christopher Bedford, the museum’s director since 2022 and a former competitive swimmer and college football player. “Every object in ‘Get in the Game’ represents a social history, creating bridges between artistic innovation and lived experience.”
It’s an exhibition that Bedford said he has been thinking about for years, when he led other museums but never had space to accommodate such a show — until now.
A team headed by Jennifer Dunlop Fletcher, the museum’s curator of architecture and design; Katy Siegel, the research director; and Seph Rodney, a writer and independent curator, reached beyond the usual sources of the museum’s own collection and other institutions to secure pieces from private collectors and sports organizations like the International Tennis Hall of Fame and the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
“We didn’t want to focus on a single sport,” said Siegel. “Sports are for everybody. We wanted to take seriously things that matter to ordinary people, which makes them central to our culture.”
At the heart of the exhibition are five sections, each meant to reflect different concepts as the viewer moves along a football field length of the seventh floor.
The first, “Winning and Losing,” uses competition as a metaphor for the hopes and disappointments of everyday life. A vibrant painting, “Fumble in the Line,” one of several by Ernie Barnes, a former pro football player who died in 2009, shows muscular players scrambling for a loose ball, an easy allegory for life’s quotidian challenges.
Nearby is a series of what appears to be competition trophies by Jean Shin, a Brooklyn-based sculptor. But look closely: They are each topped with a figure doing a mundane good deed, one with a lawn mower, another with a shovel, another delivering food.
In “Fan’s Life,” Maurizio Cattelan, the Italian artist who stirred buzz and controversy at Art Basel Miami in 2019 with a banana duct taped to a wall, created what might be the world’s longest foosball game. It was built with control levers for 11 players on each side, approximating an actual soccer game. Visitors to the exhibition are invited to play.
In a homage to San Francisco’s beloved Stephen Curry of the Golden State Warriors (and his fans), a large montage by Kevin Beasley of Queens, N.Y., juxtaposes nine images of his No. 30 jersey. For Bay Area football fans, there’s a pristine trading card of the 49ers quarterback Joe Montana, from the season they won their first Super Bowl.
Two highlights of “Breaking Records/Breaking Rules,” the next section, are images inspired by Muhammad Ali and the distance swimmer, Diana Nyad. Samuel Fosso, a Central African Republic photographer, serves as a stand-in for the boxer, with five arrows piercing his body and his face reflecting a look of resignation. Or is it defiance?
“Diana,” a pigment print by the Los Angeles-based photographer Catherine Opie, shows Nyad nude from the back, her skin tones divided between sun-baked limbs and untouched areas protected by her swimsuit, a difference that speaks to her long hours of training and grueling pursuits.
“Field of Play” celebrates the variety of venues where sports occur, from large stadiums to boxing rings and local basketball courts. A 2004 abstract painting by Julie Mehretu, “Stadia,” merges the swirls of fans, decorative banners and track runners racing to a finish line. Chase Hall’s 2023 acrylic of a determined surfer navigating a wave’s tube, “Between The Face and The Lip,” suggests the proximity of success and failure.
Gabriel Orozco, a Mexican conceptual artist, created a four-person “Ping Pong Table” in the shape of a four-leaf clover.
The final section, “Mind and Body,” explores the interconnectedness of physical and mental activity. Shaun Leonardo does it through a pair of charcoal drawings of brain scans of athletes who suffered brain damage from the violence they experienced in competition.
Savanah Leaf, a filmmaker who competed in volleyball for Britain in the 2012 Olympics, made two nine-minute videos to show how humans are measured and molded for optimum athletic success. Leaf is the object in the first video, a group of children in the second.
“I wanted to make the viewer as uncomfortable as I felt,” she said, alluding to her own experiences as a competitor.
Some objects in “Get in the Game” need minimal interpretation, like a prosthetic running leg or a series of Nike running and basketball shoes that have become collectors’ items for representing high performance, high fashion or the athletes who actually wore them.
But many more works may cause the viewer to linger, to contemplate their larger meaning or to stir a personal memory — all demonstrating how sports, modern culture and fans are intrinsically linked. That, Bedford insisted, is what he and his curatorial team intended all along.
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