FLUSHING, NY.- The Godwin-Ternbach Museum at Queens College (CUNY), is presenting Legends: Athleticism in Asian/American Art, which opened on February 10, 2026. This exhibition explores the intersection of art and sport through the work of contemporary Asian and Asian American artists. While often considered distinct fields, this exhibition highlights how sport and artistic expression serve as interconnected arenas. Legends examines how artists of Asian descent engage with the shared language of art and sport to reflect identity, nationalism, gender, the body, spectatorship, and performance. This exhibition features artists and collectives across a wide range of artistic media — including painting, installation, fashion, and video — to conceptually illustrate these topics.

This exhibition emerges at a moment of growing artistic interest in athletics.

However, Legends is the first exhibition to specifically focus on the relationship between art and sports within contemporary Asian and Asian American art.

The global reach of sports provides a compelling framework for examining Asian and Asian American identities amidst rising nationalisms and anti-Asian sentiments. In the U.S., stereotypes surrounding Asian and Asian American athletes continue to limit visibility and inclusion in sports, even as American leagues like the National Basketball Association (NBA) thrive financially by engaging with Asian markets. As noted by Astria Suparak and Brett Kashmere: “Sports are used for political purposes all the time at different scales and offer an important site of struggle that goes unrecognized and underreported.”

Legends considers how artworks that adopt the language of sport can challenge essentialist narratives, instead emphasizing individual artistic voices and the diverse, transnational concerns that shape contemporary Asian and Asian American art today.

Legends debuts installations by The Chinatown Basketball Club and Astria Suparak, alongside a new painting by Kaarina Chu Mackenzie. Additional artists represented include: Lanna Apisukh, Christopher Chan, Jamie Chan, Maia Chao, Edward Cheng, Caroline Garcia, Jocelyn Hu, Alison Kuo, Andrew Kuo, Dustin Lin, Paul Pfeiffer, Kenneth Tam, Sixing Xu, and Johan Yamin.

Programs in conjunction with the exhibition are open to students and the public. This exhibition was organized by Jayne Cole Southard, art historian and lecturer at The City College of New York, in collaboration with Godwin-Ternbach Museum co-directors Louise Weinberg and Maria Pio.