{"id":228554,"date":"2026-05-12T14:22:37","date_gmt":"2026-05-12T14:22:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/228554\/"},"modified":"2026-05-12T14:22:37","modified_gmt":"2026-05-12T14:22:37","slug":"brooklyns-barclays-center-is-going-all-in-on-art-with-a-new-residency","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/228554\/","title":{"rendered":"Brooklyn\u2019s Barclays Center Is Going All-In On Art With a New Residency"},"content":{"rendered":"

\t\t\"An<\/a>LaToya Ruby Frazier\u2019s The Liberty Portraits: A Monument to the 2024 Champions at Barclays Center in Brooklyn. Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone. Photography by Daniel Greer<\/p>\n

There is quite a bit to do and see at Brooklyn\u2019s Barclays Center, with men\u2019s and women\u2019s professional basketball, boxing matches, college basketball and hockey, concerts (Ariana Grande<\/a> and Bruce Springsteen<\/a> are on the docket for this spring), places to eat, places to drink and a store with Brooklyn Nets and New York Liberty merch. Next up, Brooklyn Sports & Entertainment, parent company of the Barclays Center, is going all in on art. This fall, Sarah Sze<\/a>\u2019s Wave, which consists of 250 screens projecting moving images, will be installed in the arena\u2019s atrium, followed by the installation of large-scale paintings by Rashid Johnson<\/a> and Mark Bradford<\/a> in the new Flatbush Premium entrance. In the spring of 2027, Kambui Olujimi<\/a>\u2019s We Always Have Room For One More will go up on Ticketmaster Plaza.<\/p>\n

Placing works of art in sports stadiums and arenas is not new. The first venue to do so in a big way was Arlington, Texas\u2019s AT&T Stadium (home of the Dallas Cowboys), which in 2009 installed works by Doug AItken<\/a>, Olafur Eliasson<\/a>, Ellsworth Kelly, Julie Mehretu<\/a> and many more. Several others followed suit, including those used by baseball\u2019s Florida Marlins, football\u2019s Kansas City Chiefs and Minnesota Vikings, and basketball\u2019s Golden State Warriors. What makes the Barclays Center\u2019s embrace of art notable is that it recently inaugurated the sports world\u2019s first residency program. Paul Pfeiffer<\/a>, the arena\u2019s first artist-in-residence, is well-known in the art world, having been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Whitney and MCA Chicago, with works in the permanent collections of New York\u2019s MoMA, the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and other institutions in Europe and South America.<\/p>\n

Perhaps unsurprisingly, sports has been a sustained focus of his practice, including his 2000 video The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, which features a series of images of basketball games, and the 2001 The Long Count (The Rumble in the Jungle), which features the 1974 bout between Muhammad Ali<\/a> and George Foreman<\/a>\u2014both of which edited out the actual athletes. In other works, Pfeiffer presents stills of basketball players with the ball removed or videos of basketball players in motion with the ball digitally edited out, revealing the athletes\u2019 shapes and gestures. \u201cHe\u2019s had this interest in the question: What is the player outside of the game? What is the player as a body?\u201d Andria Hickey<\/a>, artistic consultant to the Barclays Center, told Observer. \u201cThis sort of question of movement in space and taking out some of the specifics of the game to really examine that form. So, that was also a big interest of ours, his clear focus and investigation of basketball.\u201d<\/p>\n

Pfeiffer\u2019s residency will be a collaboration with multidisciplinary artist Shaun Leonardo<\/a>, whose social practice explores the intersection of community engagement and experimental pedagogies, often engaging the subjects of masculinity, sports and race. The two artists will create a media workshop bringing \u201ctogether local participants, artists and community partners, with Barclays Center as both subject and site of inquiry,\u201d Hickey explained. \u201cWe intentionally created the residency without the expectation of producing an artwork, allowing artists time to observe, think and dream.\u201d<\/p>\n

This isn\u2019t Pfeiffer\u2019s first time engaging with a sports venue. His audio and visual work Red Green Blue examined the mechanics of performance through close-up footage of\u00a0 University of Georgia Redcoat Marching Band members and their directors during and between periods of football play. \u201cPaul is very well known for the work he\u2019s done with other stadiums,\u201d Hickey said. \u201cHe\u2019s created a number of films and video works and sound installations that have all dealt with the space and spectacle of sport, and in particular the arena as an architectural space. He\u2019s also made sculptures about that. And he\u2019s very invested in the whole infrastructure of what a sports stadium can be, from the people that work there, to the audience, to the way that the cameras frame the game. He\u2019s investigating that space as it relates to broader social and cultural changes.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"A\"A<\/a>Artist LaToya Ruby Frazier with Clara Wu Tsai, co-owner of the Brooklyn Nets, the New York Liberty and Barclays Center. Courtesy Clara Wu Tsai<\/p>\n

Nominations from an art committee formed in 2024\u2014currently consisting of LACMA director Michael Govan<\/a> and chief curator Clara Kim<\/a>, Serpentine director Hans Ulrich Obrist<\/a> and Brooklyn Museum director Anne Pasternak<\/a>\u2014guided the arena\u2019s selection of artists, but the push to bring more art to the area came from co-owner Clara Wu Tsai<\/a>. \u201cIt\u2019s really a passion project of hers to bring art, sport and social justice into conversation,\u201d Hickey said. \u201cShe\u2019s very excited about the idea of bringing art to non-traditional spaces and non-traditional audiences.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sports fans and concert-goers probably know the basic rules\u2014don\u2019t touch wall works, don\u2019t climb on sculptures and don\u2019t take out your post-game aggressions on the art\u2014but it is something of an experiment that sports venues have been conducting. \u201cPeople really do respect the art and don\u2019t damage them,\u201d said Tracie Speca-Ventura<\/a>, owner and president of the California-based company Sports & The Arts, which has installed artworks in more than 13 stadiums around the country over the past 15 years. \u201cConcession carts damage artworks much more than fans do.\u201d (She added that European soccer fans are rowdier than U.S. sports fans by a long shot.)<\/p>\n

Hickey acknowledged that security is a priority. \u201cWe\u2019re thinking about safety, but we\u2019re also kind of working around it, if that\u2019s a way to think about it, by specifically working with media and artists that make it easy for engagement with large crowds who may have a lot of beer in their hands.\u201d She added that artist LaToya Ruby Frazier<\/a>\u2019s large-scale portraits of the New York Liberty, reinstalled at Barclays\u2019 suite level, have been viewed by \u201clarge groups of people\u201d whom she has found to be \u201cquite respectful.\u201d<\/p>\n

Another less-than-surprising fact about art in sports venues is that it is often contextually themed. The artwork at Arrowhead Stadium and U.S. Bank Stadium celebrates regional artists in Kansas City and Minneapolis, respectively. But the large-scale artwork in AT&T Stadium is less about Dallas or sports and more focused on marquee artists such as Aitken, Mel Bochner<\/a>, Eliasson, Kapoor, Jenny Holzer<\/a>, Sol LeWitt<\/a>, Mehretu, Odili Donald Odita<\/a> and Lawrence Weiner<\/a>. The stadium\u2019s full collection consists of 99 paintings, sculptures and photographs by 66 artists, and local school groups regularly tour the works. \u201cOur family always envisioned AT&T Stadium as more than just the home of the Dallas Cowboys,\u201d Charlotte Jones<\/a>, co-owner and chief brand officer of the Dallas Cowboys, told Observer. \u201cIt was designed to be a cultural landmark where sports and art exist side-by-side in a way that no other stadium has been able to replicate.\u201d<\/p>\n

Barclays veers a bit more toward the AT&T model than toward Arrowhead. \u201cWe are interested in Brooklyn artists, of course, and we will be showcasing a number of them, but we\u2019re also really interested in bringing international global artists to Brooklyn,\u201d Hickey explained. \u201cWe wanted to really allow the artists to be as creative as possible, to be as inspired as possible, and to follow their own inspiration. And so we did not create an umbrella theme. We are simply letting the artists lead.\u201d<\/p>\n

Artworks are not out of place in these venues because \u201csports arenas are not just for sports. These are event centers,\u201d Speca-Ventura said, adding that \u201cfor sports franchises, an art collection opens up marketing opportunities and very good press.\u201d The audience for this marketing includes people planning weddings, high school proms, birthday parties, graduations, bar mitzvahs, corporate outings and themed events, as sports venues compete with hotels, historic homes, convention centers and museums for these and other events. As usual, where there\u2019s commerce, you\u2019ll also find art.<\/p>\n

Observer\u2019s latest for art collectors<\/p>\n

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