Gina Adams
United States, (Ojibwa, Lakota, Irish, and Lithuanian descent) born 1965
Honoring Modern Unidentified 27, Spirit That Remains, 2015
Oil and encaustic on ceramic
9 in. diameter
Courtesy of the artist and Accola Griefen Fine Art, Brooklyn

Gina Adams is interested in histories of cultural preservation and forced assimilation. In that context, basketball holds mixed connotations for her. She acknowledges that many Native Americans see the game as a path to both higher education and acceptance into popular culture. But, she also notes that basketball’s history in Native communities goes back to early twentieth-century boarding schools that forced indigenous students to assimilate to white culture. Covered with her own hybrid vocabulary of designs inspired by those found in Native arts, Adams’s ceramic basketballs bear witness to these conflicting associations.

© Gina Adams, photo by Aaron Paden, courtesy of the artist and Accola Griefen Fine Art, Brooklyn

Daniel Arsham
United States, born 1980
Rose Quartz Eroded Basketball Rack, 2019
Pink selenite, rose quartz, hydrostone, and powder-coated steel stand
42 x 40 ½ x 22 ¾ in.
Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin, New York

Daniel Arsham creates imagined relics of our present. Sports equipment is a frequent find among these artifacts, especially basketballs. We associate the game with teams and brands, competition and success. In addition, many of us have tactile memories of playing the game. To see these balls in crystallized, fractured form disrupts their meaning. Rather than playthings, they resemble specimens. Arsham seems to ask: What will become of today’s famed basketball stars and sporting brands? Will the game be as popular in the future as now? Which aspects of our culture will fade and which will endure?

© Daniel Arsham, photo by Guillaume Ziccarelli, photo courtesy of the artist and Perrotin, New York

Bill Bamberger
United States, born 1956
Farm Home by Cotton Field, Plymouth, North Carolina, 2004
Color inkjet print
19 5/16 x 28 ⅞ in.
Courtesy of the artist 

Bill Bamberger photographs outdoor basketball hoops around the world. His pictures underscore the popularity of a game that is relatively simple in its structure. One needs only a ball and a hoop to play. The hoop may or may not have a net or a backboard. It might be suspended above painted asphalt or a bare patch of ground. Bamberger’s images of hoops don’t depict people, but they evoke the players who have used them. Collectively, the images highlight the universality of a game that is played by rich and poor, formally and informally, in countless places.

© Bill Bamberger

Kendell Carter with photographer Dawn Altier
United States, born 1970; United States, born 1978
Meditation on Team (Waves for Scottie), 2017
Color Duratran photograph and lightbox
38 x 48 x 5 in.
Courtesy of the artists and Edward Cella Art & Architecture, Los Angeles

Overlooking the sea, Kendell Carter sits with his head bowed, hands on his knees. The pose is meditative, and the scene recalls advertisements for retreats or wellness centers. Unexpected, however, is the basketball jersey that he wears—clothing associated with fast-paced play on an indoor court, with bright lights, and chaotic noise. In the contrast between the pictured tranquility and the imagined competition lies the tension that interests Carter. Describing this image, he notes, “It’s an alternative to the idea of the physically heroic male athlete” whose success rests in physical strength and individual dominance.

© Kendell Carter and Dawn Altier, photo courtesy of the artists

André Leon Gray
United States, born 1969
Black Magic (It's Fantastic), 2005
Acrylic, rhinestones, basketball, braided synthetic hair, street sweeper brush, shoelaces, headband, miniature clay pots, wood, and cowrie shells on wood ironing board
67 x 31 x 9 ½ in.
North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh. Purchased with funds from the Friends of African and African American Art, and with additional funds provided by North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company

Using discarded objects, André Leon Gray crafts artworks that speak to spirituality, philosophy, and black culture. In this mask-like sculpture, he comments on the desires for power and achievement that are a part of competitive sports. The mask’s head is crowned with a basketball framed by a street sweeper’s brush.Beneath it, rhinestones form a stylized basketball, its grip lines tipped like compass arrows suggesting movement, perhaps the quest for success. That design is inspired by drawings used in Haitian Vodou ceremonies to invoke spirits. On the mask’s headband hovers one of basketball’s most celebrated “spirits,” Michael Jordan.

© André Leon Gray, photo courtesy of the artist and the North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh

David Hammons
United States, born 1943
Money Tree, 1992
Sepia print
16 ⅛ x 10 ⅞ in.
Nasher Museum of Art, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina. Gift of Blake Byrne, 2017.4.7

David Hammons uses humble materials and sharp wit to create artworks that speak to black experiences. He has long been inspired by makeshift basketball hoops found in black communities. When he created this image of a found hoop for a magazine, he added the caption: “Ready made magic. A basketball hoop fashioned from the rim of a bicycle tire, embedded in a living tree in a Charleston backyard, testifies to the ingenuity of its anonymous maker.” That laudable description is countered by his sarcastic title, Money Tree—an allusion to fabled riches that the construction seems unlikely to yield.

© David Hammons, photo courtesy of the Nasher Museum of Art, Durham, North Carolina

Jeff Koons
United States, born 1955
One Ball Total Equilibrium Tank (Spalding Dr. J Silver Series), 1985
Glass, steel, sodium chloride reagent, distilled water, and basketball
64 ¾ x 30 ¾ x 13 ¼ in.
Art Bridges, Bentonville, Arkansas

This deceptively simple sculpture is full of complexities. The ball hovers thanks to an exacting balance of saltwater. At once it evokes a scientific specimen, the sun in the sky, and a new object not yet taken from its package. Koons specifies the basketball’s brand, Spalding, and its product line, the Dr. J Silver Series—named for the famous Philadelphia 76ers player Julius Erving who is famed for his dunk shot. Dr. J’s name brings another layer of associations, as the suspended ball recalls the moments of anticipation as a player sails through the air to make a shot.

© Jeff Koons, photo courtesy of Art Bridges, Bentonville, Arkansas

Suzanne McClelland
United States, born 1959
Well Hung, 2004
WNBA jerseys, silk, plastic pearls, sequins, ribbon, fake fur, feather trim, rope, and WNBA duffle bag
Dimensions variable, approximately 8 x 12 ft.
Courtesy of the artist and Team Gallery, New York


By 2004, less than a decade old, the Women’s National Basketball Association had expanded from its original eight teams to thirteen, and more than ten million fans had attended its games. Despite this success, when Suzanne McClelland went looking for WNBA team jerseys at the NBA store on New York’s Fifth Avenue, she recalls, “The women’s jerseys were relegated to one messy circular display rack near the bathrooms in the basement . . . greatly reduced in price.” In Well Hung, with its sly, double-entendre title, she gives the garments a far more triumphant display.

© Suzanne McClelland, photo courtesy of the artist

Esmaa Mohamoud
Canada, born 1992
One of the Boys (Yellow Back), 2018
Color inkjet print
60 x 40 in.
Courtesy of the artist and and Georgia Scherman Projects, Toronto


Esmaa Mohamoud grew up as the only daughter in a family of five children. She loved playing basketball with her brothers, but her mother insisted that she wear dresses. So, Mohamoud would top them with a basketball jersey. In her photographs, she probes gender stereotypes by posing men and women in basketball jerseys that have been transformed into ball gowns. Here, the model is shot from behind with her head bowed such that her identity remains anonymous. In contrast to the energy associated with the game, she registers stillness, one that can be read as defiant or contemplative.

© Esmaa Mohamoud

Lorna Simpson
United States, born 1960
Poets, 2013
19 framed black-and-white photographs with acrylic and oil stick; 19 aluminum boxes with acrylic
Dimensions variable
Courtesy of the artist and and Hauser & Wirth


On the left of Lorna Simpson’s Poets, floating black dots on silver rectangles suggest a hidden logic or code. On the right, one finds they correspond to the locations of basketballs held by players in historic newspaper photographs.Simpson emphasized the photographs’ original crop marks, overlaying editorial notations with acrylic and oil stick, to remind us that images—like history—are always the result of choices and context. With some hung upright and others turned sideways, the improvisational placements underscore the fast pace of the game’s players, the quick mark-making of the editors, and the topsy-turvy nature of history.

© Lorna Simpson, photo courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth

Victor Solomon
United States, born 1981
Church, 2019
Stained glass, 24k-gold-plated hand-wrought steel, acrylic, and crystals
10 x 4 x 4 ft.
Courtesy of the artist


Victor Solomon creates basketball hoops inspired by the décor of palaces and cathedrals. Recalling his youth as a mixed-race kid in East Boston, he remembers that it was on his neighborhood basketball courts that racial and ethnic distinctions disappeared. While celebrating that inclusivity, his sculptures also acknowledge economic divides between the many who aspire to basketball stardom and the few who achieve it. And, they underscore the precariousness of fame: while designed to precisely mimic actual backboards and hoops, their fragile beauty renders the munable to withstand the shock of a ball hitting them.

© Victor Solomon, photo by Geordy Pearson, courtesy of the artist

Hank Willis Thomas
United States, born 1976
Branded Head, 2003
Lambda photograph
30 x 20 in.
Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York


Artist Hank Willis Thomas considers the legacies of branding across time. He is particularly concerned with the commodification of black bodies, noting,“For so many African American men...the idea of ascending is chained to ascending through sports and entertainment.” Such ideas take poignant form in his photograph of a black man in profile. Cropped so that the features of his face are missing, the figure becomes anonymous. Marked only by the Nike swoosh on the side of his head, he is transformed from an individual to a thing, no longer a subject but an object.

© Hank Willis Thomas, photo courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York