Flattened basketballs as art
The First Art Newspaper on the Net    Established in 1996 Saturday, November 23, 2024


Flattened basketballs as art
Artworks in the studio of Tyrrell Winston, whose art is often fashioned from discarded items, especially basketballs, in Queens, Oct. 15, 2020. Winston has no formal art training, but he has made a career out of combining his two loves — basketball and art — to create compelling three-dimensional works. Brittainy Newman/The New York Times.

by Sopan Deb



NEW YORK (NYT NEWS SERVICE).- For many of us, the outdoors serve as a refuge — a place to gather (at a social distance, of course) and live some sort of normalcy as the pandemic continues to disrupt society.

Then there is artist Tyrrell Winston, who has spent years scouring the outside world to gather the material he has made integral to his work. Winston’s pieces are typically made with objects he finds outside — most commonly, flattened basketballs and cigarette butts.

“When I’m walking down the street, I’m seeing art materials,” Winston said during a recent Zoom interview. “It’s literally, ‘What can I use or what can I look at that I have never seen before?’ ”

Winston, 35, is based in New York City and has no formal art training, but he has made a career out of combining his two loves — basketball and art — to create compelling three-dimensional works. He said he was currently constructing something for Dan Gilbert, the owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers: a piece of 168 flattened basketballs. (Gilbert had commissioned two other pieces by Winston that are outside the Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse, where the Cavaliers play.)

Once Winston finishes this piece, it will be the largest artwork of flattened basketballs collected by an NBA owner, supplanting one that belongs to Michael Rubin, a Philadelphia 76ers co-owner, who has a Winston piece made of 105 basketballs.

The flattened basketballs used to come from Winston’s travels through Manhattan and Brooklyn. A used basketball, he said, tells its own story. “And I do not have to ascribe, put words with it, and it becomes abstract in that way,” he said. “I want my work to mean many things to many people. There is no one definitive meaning.”

Now, Winston has graffiti artists sourcing balls for him in California, upstate New York, Florida, Texas and other parts of the United States. They often come from train tracks, Winston said, a common home for basketballs. Or junk shops. Estate sales. Any place. They just have to be used.

“Weather is my favorite assistant, and that’s just something I have no desire to try to figure out how to manipulate or that I want to, because the ethos of the work is about all of these touches that are not mine,” he said.

One reason Winston started using found pieces for his art was that he had $150,000 in college debt when he graduated from Wagner College with an arts administration major during the recession in 2008. He did not have money to buy materials, and on top of that, he didn’t know how to paint. But he knew he wanted to be an artist, especially after attending a Dada exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art.

Two of Winston’s biggest influences are Marcel Duchamp, the French artist who died in 1968, and David Hammons, an American artist. They pioneered “found art” pieces — although in very different ways. Duchamp was a father of Dadaism, an avant-garde art movement of the early 20th century that aimed to be “anti-art.” He dabbled in the whimsy and the outward rejection of conventional art, as in his piece “Fountain,” a urinal he signed “R. Mutt,” considered one of the most notable artworks of the 20th century. In the latter half of the 20th century, Hammons constructed several vivid commentaries on being Black in America through pieces made from hair on the floor in barbershops, from sweatshirts and from constructing basketball hoops several stories high, among many others.




Sports are a clear influence on Winston’s art, even aside from flattened basketballs and used nets — another common material for him. He grew up a Los Angeles Clippers fan in Orange County, California. One of his pieces, 2019’s “Don’t Forget to Floss,” has a used basketball rim on top of a stool. It is a direct homage to Duchamp, who did the same with a bicycle wheel in one of his early works. Winston’s latest exhibit is a digital display of his takes on sports fandom, in partnership with the Library Street Collective, a gallery in Detroit. Sports fans will find many of the pieces familiar and possibly sacrilegious, depending on one’s point of view.

Winston, whose work has been displayed all over the world, takes on a sports-obsessed society, particularly the hype surrounding sports memorabilia. Here is a look at some of the pieces on display.

‘Punishment Paintings’
In this series of paintings, Winston recreates the signatures of some of the most famous athletes in history — painting their autographs over and over in a series called “Punishment Paintings.” Among the athletes whose autographs Winston recreates are Michael Jordan, Pete Rose, Muhammad Ali and Mickey Mantle. He suggests that their level of fame is a form of “punishment” in itself, because society does not allow them to be flawed.

“I want people to ask, ‘Why have I chosen these people?’” Winston said, adding, “We have commodified some of these athletes and we look at them as immortal and put an unfair expectation on them sometimes.”

But Winston said that the punishment of fame isn’t the only kind of punishment he is concerned with. There is also the physical.

“So when I say, ‘Punishment Paintings,’ too, it’s the training and the mental endurance that these people that we put on these pedestals have to endure,” Winston said.

‘Signing Sessions’
This is one that hard-core sports fans may find surprising. Winston simply takes pieces of valuable, authenticated, signed memorabilia — such as a Jordan-autographed basketball and a Rose-signed baseball — and puts his own John Hancock on them, a purposeful act of desecration.

The act is an homage in itself. Winston likened it to an act by Robert Rauschenberg, the influential American artist who, like Duchamp, specialized in turning artistic expectations on their head. Rauschenberg once took a valuable drawing by Willem de Kooning, another 20th-century giant of American art who popularized abstract expressionism, and erased it with de Kooning’s permission. He put the blank piece of paper on display in 1953. Even as one of Rauschenberg’s most daring pieces, to take a valuable drawing and perform an act of what some would consider destruction, it did not create a public sensation until the 1960s.

To Winston, the signing of the Jordan ball is a tribute in itself. But he has an analogy that basketball fans today may more readily recognize as an explanation for this piece of work.

“It is Iverson crossing over Jordan his rookie year and hitting that shot,” Winston said. “I like to have those parallels. This is a moment in our history, but it’s also an athletic accomplishment. And me doing that Jordan ball, I mean, I’ll tell you, man, I was so nervous. It’s because of the respect and the admiration that I have for Michael Jordan as a basketball player. And I still think my signature looks kind of funny on it because I have so much respect.”


© 2020 The New York Times Company










Today's News

October 22, 2020

Finding Innovative Digital Solutions for Artists

Rare Brueghel the Younger painting sale in Belgium

Banksy take on Monet masterpiece sells for £7.6 million

Jacob Lawrence painting, missing for decades, is found by Met visitor

Doyle to auction Old Master Paintings & Drawings on October 28

Sotheby's offers Alberto Giacometti's monumental 'Grande Femme I' in special sealed bid private sale

2 broke artists started a bakery at home. It's a pandemic hit.

Flattened basketballs as art

Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac Paris exhibits two series of metal paintings by Robert Rauschenberg

Jazz pianist Keith Jarrett unlikely to perform again after strokes

Mysterious vandal attacks at Berlin museums

FENIX Museum for Migration acquires iconic relief: Les émigrants by Honoré Daumier

UK museums fight for survival as virus ravages sector

Asia's biggest film fest opens as a shadow of its usual self

Artist STIK to fund new wave of public sculpture in Hackney

The Foundling Museum stages first ever exhibition by fashion provocateur Jonny Banger

Iceland tourism prepares for a comeback

Exhibition offers a comprehensive overview of the work of Magnus Enckell

Ruth Falcon, soprano turned master teacher, dies at 77

Richard Tuttle represented by David Kordansky Gallery

Tornabuoni Art's new Paris gallery presents works by Italian pioneers of visual experimentation

Michal Chelbin joins ClampArt

Los Angeles Modern Auctions sets new records with robust fall auction

Holabird Western Americana Collections will host a huge 5-day sale

7 Benefits of 3D Art for Kids

Pros and Cons of Selling a House During the Covid-19 Situation

An In-Depth Look into "Abstract: The Art of Design"

The Hidden Art Behind Persian Rugs

10 Things to know before Playing on an Online Casino

Medical cannabis

Play Online Casino With Regard To The Living




Museums, Exhibits, Artists, Milestones, Digital Art, Architecture, Photography,
Photographers, Special Photos, Special Reports, Featured Stories, Auctions, Art Fairs,
Anecdotes, Art Quiz, Education, Mythology, 3D Images, Last Week, .

 



Founder:
Ignacio Villarreal
(1941 - 2019)
Editor & Publisher: Jose Villarreal
Art Director: Juan José Sepúlveda Ramírez
Writer: Ofelia Zurbia Betancourt

Attorneys
Truck Accident Attorneys
Accident Attorneys
Holistic Dentist
Abogado de accidentes
สล็อต
สล็อตเว็บตรง

Royalville Communications, Inc
produces:

ignaciovillarreal.org juncodelavega.com facundocabral-elfinal.org
Founder's Site. Hommage
to a Mexican poet.
Hommage
       

The First Art Newspaper on the Net. The Best Versions Of Ave Maria Song Junco de la Vega Site Ignacio Villarreal Site Parroquia Natividad del Señor
Tell a Friend
Dear User, please complete the form below in order to recommend the Artdaily newsletter to someone you know.
Please complete all fields marked *.
Sending Mail
Sending Successful