SFMOMA Goes All in For Sports

It’s difficult to suppress a dazed smile as the elevators open on the seventh floor of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The sensory bombardment is immediate: speakers play the sounds of a cheering crowd; split-flap displays clatter above; a giant image of 1985 Bay to Breakers runners surrounds an arched entryway; and white stripes peel off in different directions across the gallery’s wood floor.

The effect is multipurpose gym, funhouse, cacophony. In other words: museum show as stadium experience. Get in the Game, SFMOMA’s largest-ever exhibition, contains over 200 artworks and design objects spread across the length of a football field. Paintings and photographs hang beside surfboards and tennis rackets. Notable sports moments loop jumbotron-style on overhead screens. Visitors can even play select artworks, like Gabriel Orozco’s elegant but very difficult four-sided “ping pond table” or noted prankster Maurizio Cattelan’s ultralong foosball setup.

Organized thematically into five zones that address fandom, inherent drama, boundary-breaking, less organized sports and “the dark side,” the show revels in bold accent colors and curves, courtesy of exhibition design by fuseproject and One Hat One Hand. Even the intro text invites a kind of free-for-all viewing experience, giving visitors permission to zigzag around, “searching out your favorite sport or the artworks that most interest you.”

There’s plenty of beautiful work in the show, along with truly interesting displays of how athletic gear has evolved over time. But Get in the Game may be difficult for those used to a quiet, contemplative art experience. This is not an art show so much as it is a sports show with art in it. It feels like the kind of blockbuster exhibition Yerba Buena Center for the Arts might have put on in its early years, or that the Oakland Museum of California Art might stage today.

Which is not to say it’s not a rewarding visiting experience. Get in the Game contains, even for the sports-averse, something for everyone. My personal highlights — Emma Amos’ dynamic textile Hurdlers I, David Hammons’ exquisite Basketball Chandelier, Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno’s 90-minute Zidane video or any of Ernie Barnes’ exquisite paintings of bodies in motion — will not be everyone’s favorites. Another visitor might be equally thrilled to see Nikes or what I can only assume are rare trading cards of Joe Montana and LeBron James.

There’s a breeziness to the entire undertaking that is refreshing to see in a museum that has struggled to connect with larger audiences. SFMOMA is taking a big chance with this show, and clearly hopes that going all in for sports will bring audiences all in to SFMOMA. But that breeziness also means that some of the substance, backstory and art historical significance of the artwork is subsumed by more generalized object descriptions — or simply not mentioned at all.

It’s a missed opportunity, I believe, to show a vitrine of Cary Leibowitz’s snarky, queer sports paraphernalia and not write anything — at all! — about the artist’s practice, the complicated past and present of queerness in sports, or the power of self-effacing humor. Another miss: showing Buck Ellison’s large-scale photograph Dick, Dan, Doug, The Everglades Club, Palm Beach, Florida, 1990, a golfing scene that oozes preppy privilege, without explaining that this is a group of models posed to depict white, wealthy society. (Also, he grew up in Marin, we of all audiences should get access to this context.)

Maybe the curators of Get in the Game (the museum’s Jennifer Dunlop Fletcher and Katy Siegel, and independent curator Seph Rodney) didn’t want to burden viewers with too much heaviness among the game playing. But then the gallery’s fifth and final zone (depending on how you zigzag, of course) lays that idea to rest.

The “Mind and Body” section, is the literal dark side of sports (walls are painted black, the bright colors banished). We see depictions of the intense pressure to succeed, the life-altering injuries and even deaths that sports can bring about.

Here, a small acrylic painting by Rosalyn Drexler is one of the most powerful pieces in the exhibition. Six orange-tinted images on a black background show a sequence of stills as if on a television screen: the fatal 1962 boxing match between Benny Paret and Emile Griffith. After 29 consecutive punches, Paret fell into a coma and died 10 days later.

It’s the scale of Death of Benny “Kid” Paret that is so devastating. In a show filled with stadium-sized ideas, Drexler’s canvas is as tiny — a bite-sized piece of sports trivia — as a human life should never be.

Tonally, it’s difficult to reconcile works from this zone (which includes Savanah Leaf’s completely unexplained sci-fi-tinged videos) with the more buoyant, celebratory pieces in the rest of the show. Acknowledging the darkness is a choice that every fan will have to make at some point. And at Get in the Game, it’s darkness and critique that yield some of the most rewarding viewing experiences.

‘Get in the Game’ is on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Oct. 19, 2024–Feb. 18, 2025.