Draw sports fans to an art museum? That’s the goal

By Emmanuel Morgan

As museums experiment with ways of attracting new visitors beyond a niche audience of art lovers, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art has assembled an ambitious exhibition anchored in a subject with wide appeal: sports.

Occupying more than 13,000 square feet and the museum’s entire seventh floor, “Get in the Game: Sports, Art, Culture” opened last week and runs through February. The exhibition, whose curators say is the largest SFMOMA has undertaken, features more than 150 objects, including paintings, sculptures and photographs — many of them by former athletes — as well as examples of design innovations in sporting equipment and apparel. The idea is to explore the central, and often provocative, place that sports occupy in American culture.

“We are really thinking more about broad audiences and how do we make art meaningful to more people, and to make it matter in the world in the way that sports matters to people,” said Katy Siegel, the museum’s research director and one of the exhibition’s curators. (Another curator, Seph Rodney, is a New York Times contributor.) “I think we’re interested in, how do we hook into some of that cultural energy for art and make it meaningful and accessible?”

SFMOMA is also presenting six smaller shows inspired by sports on other floors, including one devoted to the culture of skateboarding and another about major international competitions like the Olympics.

The museum enlisted Megan Rapinoe, a two-time World Cup champion, to write the foreword to the book about the exhibition, and Paige Bueckers, a University of Connecticut basketball star, to appear in a marketing video.

Among the objects on display are sports-related pieces from a Louis Vuitton collection by designer Virgil Abloh, who died in 2021, and a pair of Nike Air Jordan sneakers from 1986.

The curators also turned to artists who have competed as athletes, selecting works that explore the social pressures athletes face and the impact of sports on their bodies.

In interviews, some of those artists discussed their works.

Savanah Leaf

As a filmmaker and video artist, Leaf has been nominated for a Grammy and has won a BAFTA award. Before turning to art, Leaf was a volleyball standout at Marin Academy and would go on to play volleyball at the University of Miami and compete for Britain in the 2012 Summer Olympics. During that period, she said, she felt “like a robot” because of the repetitive training sessions.

“Everything felt really meticulous, and I almost didn’t have an emotional input into it,” said Leaf, who grew up in Marin. Those feelings helped inspire two short films, “run” and “run 002,” which will be shown on a loop at the exhibition.

One depicts Leaf running on a treadmill in a laboratory-like setting, a symbol, she said, of the pressure of juggling life’s challenges without respite. The other shows a doctor closely examining a baby, which Leaf said is about how children are siloed into sports if they have certain body traits.

“Even before you have an idea of what you want to be as an adult, people have an idea of what they think you should be because of your physicality,” she said.

Leaf, who is 5-foot-11, added she is often pegged as a former athlete at first glance because of her height.

Shaun Leonardo

Leonardo made headlines in 2020 when the director of a Cleveland museum apologized and later resigned after she canceled a show that included artwork by Leonardo depicting real-life acts of police violence. SFMOMA is including work by Leonardo that tackles a polarizing subject in the NFL.

The exhibit will feature two charcoal drawings of brain scans showing chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, a degenerative brain disease caused by repeated blows to the head. CTE has been found in posthumous examinations of many professional football players, including Aaron Hernandez and Junior Seau, both of whom died by suicide.

Leonardo, who played Division III football at Bowdoin College in Maine, said the drawings are meant to express the dynamic between football’s cultural pull and its violence. Even with more knowledge about the dangers of CTE and other injuries, professional football remains the most popular sport in America, and the NFL is the richest sports league in the world.

“It takes an abstraction of the brain and says, ‘Sit with this,’ ” Leonardo said of his drawings. “Our viewership, the spectacle of sport, we are enabling this punishment.”

Jake Troyli

When Troyli thinks of his painting “Slow Clap,” he said he envisions a “dystopian ant farm.”

The painting shows miniature naked figures engaging in a range of surreal activities. Four are celebrating with Champagne around a championship trophy. Another group is watching as someone is burned alive at the stake. Three figures are nearing the finish line of a race with a pair of dogs chasing them.

Troyli, who played Division I basketball at Presbyterian College in South Carolina, said that examining the tension of constantly working for applause was a goal of his artwork

“How do we criticize the pedestal?” he said. “What does it mean to have the spotlight on you? What does it mean to be elevated to this position where you’re on display?”

For more information, go to sfmoma.org/exhibition/get-in-the-game.