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‘Love + Basketball’ Opens in San Francisco Just in Time for the All-Star Game

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An upturned basketball hoop is covered in beads of traditional African colors.
‘The Egyptian Collar,’ the first piece in Ann ‘Sole Sister’ Johnson’s series of beaded basketball court backboards, will be on view at the Museum of the African Diaspora as part of the exhibition ‘Love + Basketball: My Freedom Gotta Rim On It.’ (Courtesy MoAD)

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
Artist and printmaker Ann ‘Sole Sister’ Johnson. (Courtesy Ann ‘Sole Sister’ Johnson)

“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.”

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To highlight these issues, Johnson pulled from Spike Lee’s Bamboozled, a film largely about flipping derogatory images on their head. A major thread in the movie is the artwork of Michael Ray Charles, the visual artist known for remaking racist depictions of African Americans, including a piece Johnson was already a fan of, titled The NBA is Tantastic.

Charles’ artwork and Lee’s film taught Johnson a valuable lesson. It’s one she still shares with her students: “If you look into the work, and not at the work, you start to see the other messages.”

Johnson applied that same maxim to the hoop dream deferred. “The struggles and the pressure,” says Johnson, “that’s what I wanted to explore.”

A closeup of Ann 'Sole Sister' Johnson's "BlingCatcher" artwork shows a tiny basketball shoe stuffed with cotton.
A close-up of Ann ‘Sole Sister’ Johnson’s ‘BlingCatcher’ artwork shows a tiny basketball shoe stuffed with cotton. (Courtesy Ann ‘Sole Sister’ Johnson)

From a distance, she says, viewers might think her work is pretty. “But then they think about what it means, especially The BlingCatchers,” says Johnson, referring to her dreamcatchers gilded in gold and adorned with miniature basketball shoes.

Raised in Cheyenne, Wyoming, Johnson now lives in Houston, Texas. While seeking out items with which to decorate her backboards, she didn’t have to look far. “I use Mardi Gras beads, which aren’t hard to find in this area,” says Johnson.

She beaded each row by hand while watching Ken Burns’ PBS documentary series Jazz, the third inspiration for her work. Completing each row of beads on the backboard took two hours; the run time of each episode of Jazz.

A basketball hoop lays on the floor against a green carpet with beaded circles around it
One of Ann ‘Sole Sister’ Johnson‘s beaded basketball backboards in the process of being converted into artwork. (Courtesy Ann ‘Sole Sister’ Johnson)

For five years straight, she decorated basketball backboards in bright beads, inverted them and added a small video component. The first iteration of the project was originally shown in Houston at Project Row Houses in 1998, her work has only grown since then.

Johnson, a printmaker with an MFA from the Academy of Art in San Francisco, has attended art workshops in the Bay Area for the past three summers. But this is her first solo exhibition on the west coast. A proud Warriors fan, she’s excited to have her work shown while the City hosts NBA All-Star weekend.

But to have it displayed at MoAD is the real achievement, she says. It’s something she’s had in the back of her mind for 20 years.

“I used to walk past there when it first opened,” says Johnson.


‘Love + Basketball: My Freedom Gotta Rim On It’ is on view from Feb. 5–Mar. 2 at MoAD in San Francisco. Deatils here.

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