The new home of the Los Angeles Clippers will give basketball fans a side of culture with their hotdogs and beer.
The $2 billion Intuit Dome, set to open in Inglewood next month, will feature $11 million worth of art around the epic, 18,000-seat arena. Created by seven artists with deep ties to Los Angeles, the pieces run the gamut from large-scale murals to immersive digital installations. Each artwork was made specifically for the site and celebrates the local Inglewood community.
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Gillian Zucker, CEO of Halo Sports & Entertainment, a.k.a. the Clippers’ parent company, unveiled six pieces on Thursday. (The seventh will debut at a later date.) The privately financed arena, built by Clippers owner Steve Ballmer, will also include another 40-plus pieces worth an additional $3 million or so.
“We designed Intuit Dome to be a place that brings people together,” Zucker said in a statement. “When it came to our public art, we wanted to deliver a collection that is as compelling to people well-versed in art as it is to a novice viewer.
The Clippers enlisted art consultant Ruth Berson to lead the commissioning process for the major artwork. Berson, who previously worked as the deputy director of curatorial affairs at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, assembled a “jury” of curators, art historians, and community members to find seven locally based artists at the top of their game. The all-star lineup includes Refik Anadol, Glenn Kaino, Patrick Martinez, Michael Massenburg, Kyungmi Shin, Jennifer Steinkamp, and Charles Gaines.
“In commissioning these works, we started conversations with these extraordinary artists who have deep ties to Los Angeles and together reflect the make-up of the Inglewood community,” Berson explained. “We showed them the model of the Intuit Dome and its campus. They chose options for their sites, and over the course of a year, they refined their ideas into the major new artworks unveiled today.”
The main entrance is anchored by Kaino’s massive sculpture Sails, which fittingly depicts a clipper ship. Nearby, Anadol’s A.I.-driven piece Living Arena creates a striking spectacle on an LED screen measuring 40 feet tall by 70 feet wide, while other walls are adorned with Shin’s stained glass mosaic Spring to Life and Martinez’s neon installation Same Boat. Outside, Steinkamp’s digital artwork Swoosh sees five animations transform the geometric exterior surface of the dome into a technicolor wonder by night and Massenburg’s joyful, 100-foot mural Cultural Playground draws in passing pedestrians and motorists.
The Clippers also commissioned Walter J. Hood to design the landscape of Intuit Dome, Glen Luchford to create the player portraits inside the arena, and Jonas Wood to design the uniforms and court.
Want to see it all in person? Intuit Dome will open on August 15 with a concert by Bruno Mars.
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