Sport and Spectator @ The McNay, San Antonio

Sport and Spectator

The McNay, San Antonio

March 1 — July 27, 2025

Hank Willis Thomas

Perseverance, 2017 

Fiberglass, chameleon auto, paint finish

Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York 

© Hank Willis Thomas

Brandon J. Donahue-Shipp

Basketball Bloom (USA Outdoor), 2024 

Basketballs and shoestrings 

Courtesy of the artist and Pentimenti, Philadelphia 

© Brandon J. Donahue-Shipp

Brian Jungen 

Horse Mask (Cher), 2016 

Nike Air Jordans 

Courtesy of the artist and Casey Kaplan, New York 

© Brian Jungen

Betsy Odom

Softball Glove, 2008

Tooled leather, and shearling

Courtesy of the artist

© Betsy Odom

Basketballs, footballs, tennis rackets, hockey sticks, jerseys, punching bags and other sports gear and paraphernalia become art in “Sport and Spectator,” on view at the McNay Art Museum. The exhibition celebrates American sports culture and confronts its complex intersection with race, gender and class. “Sport and Spectator” includes approximately 40 sculptures, textiles, screenprints and sports-themed installations by contemporary artists Brandon J. Donahue-Shipp, Jeffrey Gibson, Raul Rene Gonzalez, Sophie Inard, Brian Jungen, Justin Korver, Esmaa Mohamoud, Betsy Odom, Hank Willis Thomas, and Tyrrell Winston. Each work offers a recognizable element of sports while inviting viewers to consider athletics’ role in shaping society.

Brandon J. Donahue-Shipp

Basketball Bloom (Breakaway Outdoor), 2024

Basketballs and shoestrings 

Courtesy of the artist and Pentimenti, Philadelphia. 

© Brandon J. Donahue-Shipp

Brandon Donahue-Shipp, who aspired to a career in professional basketball, uses his artistic practice to explore social and cultural realities in Black and Brown communities. Deflated basketballs and footballs become sculptural floral arrangements that symbolize the unfulfilled dreams of Black and Brown boys who also dreamed of careers in professional sports. “Coach’s Playbook,” is a screenprint that juxtaposes a basketball diagram with the floorplans of a courtroom. Strategic plays marked in red and blue cover the image and comment on the relationship between Black and Brown communities and the American legal system.

Hank Willis Thomas

Changeup, 2019 

Mirrored stainless steel

Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York 

© Hank Willis Thomas

Multiple works by Hank Willis Thomas highlight the potential for sports to both uplift Black communities and exploit the bodies of Black athletes. Resembling abstract modern sculpture, the metallic shapes in “Perseverance” depict an athlete’s bent limbs in dynamic motion. Presenting an anonymous player in the form of a public monument, Thomas’ sculpture acknowledges the power of sports to both unite and divide. The artist finishes the sculpture with shiny auto paint to comment on the sport’s reliance on international players, many who are of African descent.

Esmaa Mohamoud transforms jerseys to bodices to address gender in sports in her “One of the Boys” series. By pairing each jersey with a floor-length skirt made of silk and velvet, the artist presents a sports-themed ballgown that challenges the propensity for male athletes to be hyper-masculine while women remain underrepresented in sports. Growing up as the only girl with four brothers, she was a self-described tomboy. When her mom insisted that she wear a dress, she once wore a jersey over it.

Sophie Inard 

First base en rose, 2023 

Vintage hockey helmet with cotton yarn

Courtesy of the artist 

© Sophie Inard

Sophie Inard blankets common sports equipment with intricate patterns, bringing together the fast-paced, harsh sports world and the slower, delicate, calculated practice of crochet. She uses the “granny square” pattern reminiscent of a time that preceded modern-day technology to cover golf clubs, baseball bats, motorcycle helmets, rugby balls, boxing gloves, skateboards and other equipment. Wrapping sports equipment in soft yarn communicates the idea that opposites can coexist.

Jeffrey Gibson adorns Everlast punching bags with glass beads to pay homage to traditional Native American craft traditions while offering social and political commentary. His works also include references to artists and musicians through titles and words that appear on the works such as “The Love You Give Is the Love You Get,” inspired by lyrics from The Beatles’ “The End.” “Sharecropper” honors his grandparents, who persevered through poverty. Each work also celebrates boxing’s power to release tension and stress.

“‘Sport and Spectator’ explores the artistic alchemy of manipulating the materiality and meaning of sports paraphernalia,” said exhibition co-curator René Paul Barilleaux. “The contemporary artists featured are committed to incorporating sports equipment into their artistic practice, and this exhibition is unique in that numerous exhibitions have been organized around the theme of sports culture, but seemingly not specific to sports equipment and gear,” added co-curator Lauren Thompson.

“Sport and Spectator” is organized for the McNay Art Museum by René Paul Barilleaux, head of curatorial affairs, and Lauren Thompson, curator of exhibitions. 

McNay Art Museum

Tobin Exhibition Galleries

6000 N New Braunfels Avenue, San Antonio, TX 78209

www.mcnayart.org

Brian Jungen @ Casey Kaplan Gallery, NYC - Drawings

Brian Jungen: Drawings

Casey Kaplan, New York

Through March 6, 2021

Casey Kaplan presents “Brian Jungen: Drawings,” the artist’s fifth solo exhibition with the gallery. The show debuts a selection of recent works on paper that function as a semiotic map through which the viewer can trace a multitude of personal, historical, and pop-cultural referents. An artist of Indigenous Dane-zaa heritage, Brian Jungen’s poetic drawings reflect his ongoing exploration of memory and identity, within a broader context of globalization, ethnocentrism, and commodity culture.

Brian Jungen’s recent works on paper transpose line drawings, loose brushwork, and colorful ink markings in meandering compositions. A member of the Doig River First Nations of Northern B.C., he began drawing as a child and developed his skills while attending art school in Vancouver and during a brief period living in downtown Manhattan in the early 1990s. During this time, Brian Jungen produced hundreds of drawings that he often distributed via DIY methods, including wheat-pasting thoughout the city. By inserting his works in the street, Brian Jungen bypassed traditional institutions and independently bridged the gap between private practice and public consumption. One such intervention is the 1997 artist zine Brown Finger, republished both digitally and in print for the first time to coincide with this exhibition. The zine appropriates cliches of queerness and Indigenous people rendered as caricature, to challenge the Western gaze and the sexual politics of colonialism.

In contrast to his process-oriented sculpture practice, Brian Jungen utilizes automatic drawing as a means for unmediated, creative expression through which to engage various aspects of cultural memory - both personal and collective. This continuity is illustrated in the work, “Ogopogo,” (2020) where a scaled serpent is represented alongside other human / animal hybrids, ambiguous green ovals, and glowing yellow orbs. The title refers to a popular mythological water-being, originating from Indigenous lore and demonized as Ogopogo the lake monster by colonial European fur traders in the 19th century. In his drawing, Brian Jungen collages different symbols of the Ogopogo among graphic, abstract elements, in an exuberant cacophony of color, line, and form. The work conjures not one definitive narrative of the Ogopogo, but rather engages the rich lineage of oral tradition and sublimation of indigenous histories. A more personal exploration is evident in “My Mother Enduring Harassment” (2021). In this artwork, Brian Jungen portrays his mother as a winged angel, depicted alone but moving with confident determination. As a child, Brian Jungen’s mother adamantly encouraged his predilection for drawing. At the age of seven, Brian Jungen tragically lost both of his parents in a house fire. Brian Jungen draws his mother in mid-step, approaching a circular formation of cartoonish male figures. Collectively, these characters symbolize one of many oppressive forces that the artist’s mother had to confront throughout her lifetime. Here, Brian Jungen demonstrates the power of drawing to explore not only personal memories, but also to reimagine the life experiences of others, executed with unwavering empathy, tenderness, and grace.

Many of the drawings employ a new stamping technique achieved by cutting shapes from scraps of leather and buckskin. Brian Jungen drags the graphic cutouts through ink and presses them directly onto the paper, creating crude, stamped figures that are interwoven with playful renderings of nature, folklore, pirouetting figures, and cultural emblems. Instead of creating an illusion of depth through shading, Brian Jungen stacks his line drawings such that the viewer is confronted with a palimpsest of symbols, challenging the two-dimensional flatness of drawing. “Fever Dream” (2020), as an example, depicts a bus traveling through a psychedelic forest of mushrooms, rendered in warm ochre tones. The touristic scene emerges through lyrical red lines of varying density that form bulbous, heart-shaped curves. As with all of the artworks in this show, the composition is indeterminate; a drawing in the present tense. The viewer perceives suggestions, subtle implications, and questions with no definite answers or visual resolve - each form a potential cipher within channels of coded information.

Cohesively, the artworks in the exhibition celebrate drawing as a limitless imaginative plane where disparate ideas and modes of existence can be explored without restraint. Loose and gestural, the ink drawings offer an intimate look into the artist’s creative psyche and new windows of perception. While rife with cultural critique, the drawings speak not only to the transgressions of humanity, but to the fundamental aspects of human nature that unite us. Brian Jungen recently reflected on his hope for viewers’ experience, stating: “Perhaps these drawings can share a little of the loneliness, humor and revere that resides in us all.”

BRIAN JUNGEN (b. 1970, Fort St. John, B.C.) lives and works in the North Okanagan region of British Columbia. In 2019, his work was the subject of a major survey exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto with a fully illustrated color catalogue published on the occasion. Additional solo exhibitions include: Casey Kaplan, New York; Hannover Kunstverein; Bonner Kunstverein; Art Gallery of Alberta, Edmonton; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; The Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, Washington, D.C.; Museum Villa Stuck, Münich; Witte de With, Rotterdam; Tate Modern, London; Vancouver Art Gallery; Musée d’art Contemporain de Montréal; New Museum, New York and CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco. Recent group exhibitions include: The Weatherspoon Art Museum, UNC Greensboro, NC, Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AK, The 2018 Liverpool Biennal, UK; Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, NV; Rennie Collection, Vancouver and Vancouver Art. Brian Jungen is included in the permanent collections of the AGO, Toronto; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Crystal Bridges Museum of Contemporary Art, Bentonville, AK; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Seattle Museum of Art; The Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, Washington, D.C.; Tate Modern, London; and Vancouver Art Gallery, B.C., among others.

CASEY KAPLAN GALLERY

121 West 27th Street, New York, NY 10001

www.caseykaplangallery.com

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