With bedazzled basketball court backboards and nets styled in the fashion of Egyptian jewelry, Ann “Sole Sister” Johnson’s exhibition Love + Basketball: My Freedom Gotta Rim On It puts an eye-catching spin on San Francisco’s NBA All-Star Game celebrations.
And despite the exhibition’s title, Johnson, a longtime teacher and basketball fan, says the work (on view at the Museum of the African Diaspora from Feb. 5–Mar. 2) was inspired by movies — and none of them are the classic date-night movie Love and Basketball.
Johnson started adorning discarded rims in the mid-’90s, around the same time the documentary Hoop Dreams debuted. She’d noticed that many of her male students had hopes of becoming the next Michael Jordan or “going straight to the league” as a way to get paid to play ball.
![A Black woman in glasses and hair done up poses in a denim shirt](https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/01/3_AnnJohnson-1.jpg)
“There was no NIL in ’98,” says Johnson. “If they were getting paid it was on the low,” she adds, noting how many students would fall short of their dream without a backup plan.
The landscape may be different 30 years later, but the concept of the “hoop dream” remains, as do issues of money, pressure to perform and lack of professional guidance for many star athletes. “And bottom line is,” Johnson says during a phone call, “you’re still a young Black man. If someone wants to pull you over, they’ll pull you over.”