As museums experiment with ways of attracting new visitors beyond a niche audience of art lovers, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art has assembled an ambitious exhibition anchored in a subject with wide appeal: sports.
Occupying over 13,000 square feet and the museum’s entire seventh floor, “Get in the Game: Sports, Art, Culture” opens this week and runs through February. The exhibition, whose curators say is the largest SFMOMA has undertaken, features more than 150 objects, including paintings, sculptures and photographs — many of them by former athletes — as well as examples of design innovations in sporting equipment and apparel. The idea is to explore the central, and often provocative, place that sports occupy in American culture.
“We are really thinking more about broad audiences and how do we make art meaningful to more people, and to make it matter in the world in the way that sports matters to people,” said Katy Siegel, the museum’s research director and one of the exhibition’s curators. (Another curator, Seph Rodney, is a New York Times contributor.) “I think we’re interested in, how do we hook into some of that cultural energy for art and make it meaningful and accessible?”
SFMOMA is also presenting six smaller shows inspired by sports on other floors, including one devoted to the culture of skateboarding and another about major international competitions like the Olympics.
The museum enlisted Megan Rapinoe, the two-time World Cup champion, to write the foreword to the book about the exhibition, and Paige Bueckers, the University of Connecticut basketball star, to appear in a marketing video.
