Ronny Quevedo and Joan Semmel are included in the group exhibition, Get in the Game at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California, on view from October 19, 2024–February 18, 2025.
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's press release follows:
Sports serve as a major driver for artistic and technological innovation, community building and debates about social and cultural priorities and norms. From October 19, 2024-February 18, 2025, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) will present Get in the Game—its largest exhibition organized to date—exploring the powerful role of sports in contemporary culture. The forthcoming exhibition will examine how sports permeate culture, bring people together in shared experience and offer a critical lens through which to consider ongoing conversations about gender, race, national identity and the human body, as well as the will and desire to compete and succeed. Unfolding across multiple floors and approximately 15,000 square feet, the presentation will feature roughly 200 objects in different mediums. On view will be paintings, sculptures and mixed media works by some of today’s most important artists, as well as design breakthroughs in gear and apparel, and participatory installations that visitors can play. Together, the works in the exhibition will capture the potency of sports in shaping the aesthetics, inspirations and memorable experiences of our daily lives.
Get in the Game is curated by Jennifer Dunlop Fletcher, Helen Hilton Raiser Curator of Architecture and Design SFMOMA; Seph Rodney, independent curator and writer; and Katy Siegel, Research Director, Special Program Initiatives, SFMOMA. To bring the visual and emotional exuberance of sports into the museum context and encourage audience engagement, the exhibition will be designed by local design firm fuseproject, led by Yves Béhar. A publication will also accompany Get in the Game, featuring commissioned illustrations by artist AJ Dungo, and texts by a range of scholars, journalists, artists and athletes, as well as the exhibition curators.
“Creating exhibitions that are responsive to the happenings in our daily life and position art in dialogue with subjects of relevance, meaning and interest to a broad community is core to SFMOMA’s vision,” said Christopher Bedford, SFMOMA’s Helen and Charles Schwab Director. “Get in the Game perfectly encapsulates this drive, exploring the confluence of culture and sports and the many ways in which they influence each other. The exhibition creates space for dynamic conversations about identity, physicality, passion, ambition, resilience, and so much more. We welcome the public to experience this unique opportunity to look anew at the inspiring ways that sports, art, design and culture intersect.”
Get in the Game will be expansive in its representation of sports, with art works and design objects that reference popular team sports such as football, baseball, basketball and soccer; Olympic and solo competition, including swimming, gymnastics and figure skating; as well as skateboarding, martial arts and video gaming. An equally diverse range of artists will address sports in major works by Emma Amos, Mario Ayala, Ernie Barnes, Kevin Beasley, Karla Diaz, Nicole Eisenman, Derek Fordjour, Jeffrey Gibson, Savanah Leaf, Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi, Catherine Opie, Gabriel Orozco, Paul Pfeiffer, Cheryl Pope, Robert Pruitt, Ben Sakoguchi, William Scott, Joan Semmel, Gary Simmons and Hank Willis Thomas, among many others. Contemporary art will be joined by fashion, athletic uniforms and gear, technology-infused objects such as football helmets and motocross steering wheels and representations of the spaces where sports are played. In addition, SFMOMA will commission new installations by cartoonist Gene Luen Yang and artist and educator Jenifer K. Wofford as part of the museum’s Bay Area Walls series, which invites local artists to create site-responsive wall projects.
The exhibition will be organized around key themes relating to winning and losing; the experiences of fans; the inherent boundary-pushing nature of sports; the social and cultural contexts in which sports exist; and the mental and physical focus and duress of individual athletes. Object installations will be further punctuated with video and photography of major events in sports history, grounding the featured works in collective moments and offering new insights into the role of sports in social change. Participatory installations will invite visitors into active play and foster direct connections to the exhibition. Woven throughout Get in the Game will be opportunities to examine significant social, political and cultural dialogues through the lens of the sports experience.
