Casey Kaplan
Kevin Beasley, David Huffman, and Brian Jungen are included in Get in the Game: Sports, Art, Culture at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, opening Saturday, October 19th.
Get in the Game spotlights the influence of sports on contemporary culture. Athletic competition has inspired many contemporary artists to create works responding to the game’s emotional drama, the fan’s enthusiasm, the athlete’s discipline, and the implicit and explicit codes governing how games are played and who gets to play them. The exhibition brings together over 100 works of art, design, interactive installations, and media related to the world of sports, including athletic fashion and gear, Formula 1 race car steering wheels, and a display of surfboards.
“Sports is a great connector, and tangentially has broadened conversation on several related topics, such as labor, class, race, gender, sexuality, and physical and mental health,” says Jennifer Dunlop Fletcher, Helen Hilton Raiser Curator of Architecture and Design, who co-curated the exhibition alongside Katy Siegel, research director, special program initiatives, and Seph Rodney, independent curator and writer.
David Huffman will create his first wall-sized work for the Bay Area Walls series. Huffman has long used basketballs to reference his community and personal history, weaving the imagery into complex representational and abstract paintings.
For more information, please visit the museum’s website.
Image: Bay Area Walls featuring David Huffman’s Portals (installation view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, October 4, 2024–October 26, 2025); photo: Don Ross