“Doin’ It In The Park” Exhibition

Rush Arts Gallery

poster for “Doin’ It In The Park” Exhibition

This event has ended.

“Doin’ It In The Park” is a fine art exhibition inspired by the film Doin’ It In The Park: Pick-Up Basketball, NYC co-directed by Bobbito Garcia & Kevin Couliau.

Doin’ It In The Park, the exhibition, is an examination of pick-up basketball as a global phenomena, an act of passion and personal commitment. It is not an exploration of the game as an alternative to negative life choices. The option of choosing basketball over criminality is forever cemented in the Hip-Hop culture. As the old Biggie Smalls famous lyric goes, “Either you’re slingin’ crack-rock, or you’ve got a wicked jump-shot.” That is a narrow, stereotypical view of pick-up basketball as an alternative to a life of crime. That’s a tired, way too convenient myth. This exhibition is fertile ground for further discourse and another opportunity for sport and fine art to coalesce in a meaningful, poignant way.

It’s easy to create a metaphorical relationship between street basketball and the random nature of life. As the film’s co-director, Bobbito Garcia points out “There are no coaches, no referees, no schedule. It’s open to the pubic, competitive, and creative. Players who are a product of pickup basketball have a bit of an edge because they can adapt to different environments and game situations. The play breaks down. What do you do now? If you play pick-up, it’s, “Oh, I can create my own shot.’ Improvise. That’s a talent that comes from an unstructured environment.”

Many notable artists have successfully mused on sport – creating important works of art, yet contemporary artists’ attempts to paint and draw athletes often descend into garish illustration or caricature. Images are often gaudy animations that veer recklessly into “Leroy Neiman territory.” Painter, Leroy Neiman’s kinetic, quickly executed paintings and drawings, many of them published in Playboy, offered his fans gaudily colored visual reports on heavyweight boxing matches, Super Bowl games and Olympic contests, as well as social panoramas such as horse races. Although he exhibited constantly and his work was included in the collections of dozens of museums around the world, critical respect eluded him. Mainstream art critics either ignored him completely or, if forced to consider his work, dismissed it with contempt as garish and superficial.

While all of the work in the Doin’ It In The park is directly inspired by the content of the film, the exhibiting artists were allowed the creative freedom to interpret the spirit, energy and iconography of pick-up basketball in their own unique way. The exhibition features the work of 7 photographers and 3 painters. Photographs in the exhibition include images of pick-up ball players and basketball courts from all over the world including the United States, Argentina, China, Singapore, and Thailand.

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Schedule

from September 12, 2013 to October 18, 2013
Artist Talk Saturday October 5, 2013 3:00 - 5:00 pm.

Opening Reception on 2013-09-12 from 18:00 to 20:00

Artist(s)

Ricky Powell, TTK, Bobbito Garcia et al.

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