Are you an artist or a jock? A new exhibit asks us to rethink the split

Adrienne Fast, curator of The Reach Gallery Museum in Abbotsford, B.C. says that one thing art and sports have in common is that children generally love both of them.

"We all play games and we all like to draw or paint," she says.

But at some point around middle school, she says, that stops. Kids who are good at sports are told to go be jocks. Kids who are good at art are told to go pursue that. And most of us — who, if we're being honest, aren't especially good at either — get the message that we should go do something else entirely.

"I think a lot of people feel like the contemporary art world can be quite alienating, like they feel excluded from it," she says. "And I think people feel the same way about sports. Both really only reward very particular kinds of bodies or very particular kinds of movements or behaviours."

"I always felt like that was such a shame, because there's a world of evidence that shows that participation in sports and participation in culture in art is hugely beneficial to human beings, regardless of whether or not you're good at it."

In Game/Culture, the current exhibit at The Reach, Fast says she wanted to put together a collection from artists who look at sport from different perspectives, and ask us to question who gets to play and why.

Sculptor and installation artist Craig Willms' contribution to Game/Culture focuses on unorthodox athletic techniques, specifically the underhand free throw in basketball and the knuckleball in baseball. One of the things that fascinates him about these techniques is that they feel more accessible to regular people than other aspects of their respective sports

"​​I'm never going to throw [a baseball] 90 miles an hour." he says. "But I could throw a spineless ball and make it dance in the air if I really, really work."

He says there's also a parallel to art with these techniques.

"Underhand, free throw, sidearm, whatever — I think something in those actions disrupts the way things are done," he says. "We see that happen all the time or historically in the art world as well. Picasso comes along and does cubism. Monet paints in a very seemingly sloppy way. Modernist painters or sculptors [are] not sculpting [in a way that is] totally hyper-realistic. So I feel like there's always these kinds of parallels between sport and visual art."

Mallory Tolcher is another artist featured in Game/Culture. In her 2020 project Nothing But Net, she made basketball nets out of traditionally feminine materials, like lace and beads, hung them on hoops in her hometown of Guelph, Ont., and encouraged people to play on them. Now, she's exploring the history of women's sports uniforms. Initially, she says, in the 19th century, women weren't even really allowed to compete.

"Women were allowed to come out and play sports only to be courted," she says. "So it wasn't even like an athletic, competitive time. Women came dressed in their best so that they could get a husband."

Even after women were allowed to play competitive sports, she says that for much of the 20th century, male athletic organizers were determined to make sure female athletes still looked sufficiently "feminine."

"A lot of the fabrics that were used were dry clean-only satin, right? Or silk," she says. "Some of them had corsets built into them."

Her new project sees her making jerseys from materials like tulle with numbers made out of dried flowers, including the number 23, made famous by both Michael Jordan and LeBron James, and the number 10, which Tolcher says is a tribute to one of her hardwood heroes: Seattle Storm point guard Sue Bird.

The Reach is unusual in that it is both a gallery and a local history museum. Fast says that Tolcher's work dovetails nicely with some of the historical photos that are being displayed as a part of the exhibit.

"We have photos from the 1920s of local girls basketball teams in these huge, full-volume wool skirts," she says. "They have giant bows in their hair, like the size of their heads, that cannot be helpful to try to see where the basketball is. I did choose the contemporary artists first, but it was important to me that there also be historical connections so that there could be a kind of conversation back and forth, and the idea that contemporary art is also based in history."

Willms says that he hopes the show will get people thinking about how sports are enmeshed in our larger culture, and get more people involved in both.

"Sport is so much a part of culture," he says. "Whether it's baseball in America, or baseball in Japan, or sumo or soccer or hockey in Canada or whatever national pastime people get behind… The athlete and the artist, we all can play these [games] for fun, whatever your favourite sport is, and then everyone also can draw and take up painting or ceramics or whatever they want to do."

Game/Culture runs at The Reach Gallery and Museum in Abbotsford, B.C. until Sept. 4.