April 9th through May 28th, 2022

Attending a basketball game is electric – the buzzers, players in action, stomping feet and crowd excitement. The sounds travel in energy-filled waves. Whenever a player pivots or a referee blows their whistle, impact and airborne sound waves travel across the basketball court into the stands. The same is said of the impact that the game of basketball has had globally. The game is universal. Its influence on culture and society reverberates through every hood, borough and suburb around the world. Basketball has shaped many lives, whether it be from sharing moments with others playing recreationally or intramurally, watching larger-than-life players turned cultural icons or its impact on fashion, style and politics. This exhibition will explore basketball’s influence on our culture and subsequently, the artworld. Participating artists will address the question: As an artist and viewer, how does basketball echo throughout issues of gender, race, politics and class beyond the game? Participating artists include AK Jenkins, Lorenzo Baker, Telvin Wallace, Jonah Elijah, Bradley Ward, Joseph Sherman, Ashley Teamer and Esteban Samayoa.

Installation Images

Installation Images by Elon Schoenholz

About the Artists

Bradley Ward

Studio artist from Houston, Tx, Bradley Ward, a Texas Southern University alum and Pratt Institute MFA recipient explores the modalities and poly-characterization of survival within the Black experience through a multitude of media. Emphasizing domains in which rhythm has matriculated through the Black body, often in labor, there is also space for the extraordinary in the confluence of Black leisure. Often using sports and performance to reinforce this median within Black life. Currently focusing on the magic of Black harmony and resonance to illustrate this fraternal complexity through portraiture.

Joseph Sherman

Joseph Sherman (born. 1990) is an African, American artist living and working in Los Angeles. His practice engages photography, mixed media paintings, public + private archives, printed matter, and video. Themes of his work includes Black athleticism, Afro- diasporic imagery, and contemporary culture. Sherman is a MFA candidate at Otis College of Art and Design (‘23). He holds a decade- long career as a commercial photographer where his work’s mission is to present a passionate panoramic of Black culture.

Jonah Elijah

Jonah Elijah is a Houston, Texas native now working in Los Angeles. He received his BA in studio art from the University of Texas at San Antonio in 2017. MFA from Claremont Graduate University in 2020. Jonah Elijah’s work encapsulates black life in America and addresses controversial issues that actively affect the African American community. Using materials to explore economic inequality, displacement, or human rights Elijah’s artist practice embraces discomforting realities. Being raised around lower income hard ships Elijah builds off his own personal upbringing and creates works that reflect the black experience. Whether in his paintings or installations, Jonah layers his work with coded language offering an abstracted or representational view of what it’s like to be black today.

Ashley Teamer

Ashley Teamer’s collages explore the relationships between the body, nature, space, and time. She uses painting, sculpture, photography, and sound to creatively intervene with indoor and outdoor architecture revealing the malleability of our built environment. She has been an Artist-in- Residence at the Joan Mitchell Center (2018) and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2014). Teamer received a BFA from Boston University in 2013 and an MFA from Yale University in 2022.Her work has been most recently exhibited as a series of billboards called Lady Bleu Devils in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Esteban Samayoa (Wulffvnky)

Esteban Samayoa is an artist based in Oakland, CA. Projecting his world views through intimate black and white works, he is inspired by the community around him and the ups and downs that everyday life brings. Esteban’s work is an emotional experience, displaying details that remain unseen to those that haven’t lived them.

AK Jenkins

AK Jenkins is an interdisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles, CA and Johannesburg, South Africa working across sculpture, photography, collage and installation. Engaging with intersectional representation; using conceptualism and humor to examine how the commodification of identity tropes within media, structural systems and pop culture shapes our ideologies around desire and belonging. AK is a MFA 2023 candidate at CalArts.

Lorenzo Baker

Lorenzo Baker is an interdisciplinary artist whose art practice is conceptually rooted in the democratization of art. Lorenzo Baker ‘s practice incorporates everyday materials and readymade objects that result in sculptures, installations, and videos. Lorenzo Bakers artworks offer viewers the opportunity to experience the everyday from an altered perspective.

Graduating from Otis College of Art in Design in 2018 with a Master’s in fine art, Lorenzo Baker was a featured artist in the Group Show New Contemporaries Vol. 1, at Residency Art Gallery in Inglewood, CA. In 2020 Lorenzo Baker’s artwork was published in Umber Magazine Vol. 4 SAM, and in 2021 he was a guest artist at the Museum of African Diaspora’s in the artist studio program. Currently Lorenzo Baker is committed to a yearlong project and collaboration with The Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts.

Telvin Wallace

Telvin Wallace (b. 1997) is an interdisciplinary artist whose work focuses on mental health and the human condition. He is a recent graduate of North Carolina Central University and is finishing up his MFA in Painting at the New York Academy of Art. Wallace states that his breakthrough came about when he began to execute work that is screaming to be made based on his own subconscious. The psychologically charged work brings viewers face to face with contentious culture while proclaiming the resilience of the human spirit.