Most of the work on display in "ACE: art on sports, promise, and selfhood" at the University Art Museum at the University at Albany would be out of place in a sports bar, Nike store or any approximation of a "man cave." And thank God for that. Running through Dec. 7, "ACE" could not have come at a better time. There are encouraging signs that the American public might finally be willing to embrace a far broader definition of who our sports heroes can be. As of this writing, the most popular athlete in America right now is a voluble lesbian soccer player with purple hair and we are better for it. Likewise, perhaps the American public might be willing to expand its horizons on what art centered on sports can look like. The nation, I suspect, has reached its carrying capacity for maudlin oils of yesteryear's superstars. We can go further than LeRoy Nieman and his imitators. The paintings, sculptures and visual installations on offer here are not only proof that we can but that the results can be trenchant, spellbinding and occasionally spectacular.
After passing through the entrance and Juni Figueroa's installation "Tropical readymade landscape," a collection of soccer balls and cleats that have sprouted leaves and which reads as a tribute to the organic nature of the game at its most simple and spontaneous, we come to four pieces by Ecuadorian-American artist Ronny Quevedo in the the main gallery. The largest and most impressive is "La Gran Patria," an imposing 10-by-17-foot wall onto which the abstracted lines of a basketball court have been have been laid in in yellows, grays and blues. It's arresting on its own but with just a tiny bit of knowledge about Quevedo's recurring themes about the pre-Columbian Americas, you can be forgiven if you begin to see some rudimentary Nazca lines on the hardwood. His three other pieces stretch the purview of the show more than any other on display. They are baffling and they are wonderful. One piece, which appears to be a bird's-eye view of a track with indigenous motifs, is named in honor of Atahualpa. I won't insult you or the artist by claiming to understand it, but when we get to a place where a show ostensibly centered around sports has a piece affirming the slain last king of the Incas, we know we are somewhere bracing, new and cool.
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