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Sports are great!
They give us commonality, a shared experience that we can relish as we wear brightly colored gear and scream out communal chants.
Sports are also problematic.
Not only does it break our hearts when our team loses, but it can also quite literally break the participants of the games.
The joy and sorrow and the pride and the pain are all parts of the newest exhibit at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville. The show, called “Get in the Game: Sports, Art, Culture,” opened to the public Sept. 13 and runs through Jan. 26, 2026.
“Get in the Game” unfolds in five thematic chapters, all related to how American society interacts with, appreciates and sometimes overlooks elements of sport. The included artworks and artifacts cross a wide variety of mediums, including a quilt made from basketball jerseys, charcoal drawings, paintings and videos of great sporting feats, like a clip of Flo-Jo setting the 200-meter world record at the 1998 Summer Olympics in Seoul. It also covers a wide range of sports from basketball, baseball and football to F1 racing, fishing and e-sports.
“Sport touches every part of our lives,” said Laura Pratt, Manager of Curatorial Affairs for the museum, during a preview tour on Thursday. “It can bring out the best and worst of us.”
Pratt said that about a third of the artists in the exhibit were professional athletes before finding their artistic voice. That is true for one of the first pieces of the exhibit, the Thomas Hart Benton-esque “Fumble in the Line” by Ernie Barnes, who played in a precursor to the NFL and also the Canadian football league. He was given the nickname “Big Rembrandt” by his teammates because his love of art was already well known.
The beautiful contortion of the players scrambling for a ball is in contrast to the stark and haunting work “Slow Clap” by former Division 1 basketball player Jake Troyli, which shows athletes commodified in a series of closely monitored rituals that highlight the voyeuristic nature of our viewing habits. Similarly notable is the work “Ascension” by Titus Kaphar, which combines an iconic image of Michael Jordan midair with that of Rogler van der Weyden’s 1435 painting “The Descent from the Cross” as a statement about the way culture deifies athletes.
The exhibit shuffles through depictions of incredible achievements and the physical and mental tolls those advancements often take. Pratt mentioned the “twisties” – the name gymnasts have given to the unsettling feeling they get when they can no longer envision themselves completing their routine.
Hank Willis Thomas’ “Guernica,” 2016, mixed media, including sports jerseys. 131 in. x 281 from a private collection, courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery. “Guernica” is directly inspired by the anti-war painting of the same name by Pablo Picasso.
“You can push yourself beyond the limits of what’s physically possible, but at what costs?” she said.
Those costs are outlined in various ways, both good and bad. There are artworks celebrating athletes like Muhammad Ali and Althea Gibson, who pushed the boundaries of what we thought was possible in boxing and tennis, respectively. Around the corner from those works are charcoal drawings based on scans of brains damaged by CTE, a neurodegenerative disease caused by repeated blows to the head. There’s also an unsettling tribute to baseball pitchers with actual bone spurs removed from elbows that are affixed to a pitching net. The net sits in front of a collection of images of aspiring players with their limbs twisting at irrational angles.
The exhibition is curated by Jennifer Dunlop Fletcher, Helen Hilton Raiser Curator of Architecture and Design at SFMOMA; Seph Rodney, independent curator and writer; and Katy Siegel, Curator-at-Large, Research & Special Program Initiatives at SFMOMA. The exhibit debuted last year at SF MOMA and is roughly half artistic works and half artifacts. Several of the artifacts were switched during the move from San Francisco to Bentonville, with Pratt saying the idea was to give the exhibit a local flair. One of the local elements is a photo of Donald W. Reynolds Razorback Stadium, complete with a “hog call” chant playing overhead. Another is the inclusion of three bicycles representing the various sub-genres of that sport. One is a mountain bike used in the Tokyo Olympics, and another is a cyclocross bike. With the Cyclocross National Championship coming to Fayetteville in December, local organizers are hopeful for a crossover with those athletes.
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