Major SFMOMA artwork will find home in Chase Center.
Museum will place four major works of art on display at Chase Center as part of an open-ended partnership
When Chase Center opens in the fall, it may be the first professional basketball arena to have something hanging from the ceiling besides a giant, cube-shaped video board.
It will also have a twisting and turning 700-pound mobile by Alexander Calder, one of the pieces on loan to the Golden State Warriors from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art as part of a partnership between the museum and the NBA team. The untitled Calder piece from 1963 is part of a unique ongoing partnership to install four major works of art either borrowed from or commissioned by SFMOMA specifically for the Warriors’ new home court, officials announced Wednesday, June 12 — just a day before the Warriors and Toronto Raptors go headto-head for Game 6 of the NBA Finals at Oakland’s Oracle Arena.
In addition to the Calder mobile, a 1975 sculpture titled “Play Sculpture” by Isamu Noguchi will be situated as free public art outside the arena.
Most new sporting venues nationwide now have some art component, but this may be the first time a professional sports franchise has joined forces with a major metropolitan museum to place art at a stadium, ballpark or arena, said Golden State Warriors President and CEO Rick Welts.
“It goes back to the genesis of what we are trying to create
here,” Welts explained. “This is the new public gathering place in the Bay Area, and we want it to reflect sports, entertainment and art.”
Welts has visited and studied every arena in the NBA and said he has not seen anything even close to the plan they have for Chase Center. Most prominent will be a signature work of sculpture to be located outside the arena and created by Danish artist Olafur Eliasson. The nature of the piece is a secret, but it is being curated by Dorka Keehn of the San Francisco Arts Commission and will be introduced in August.
An additional 33 artists have been commissioned by the contractor Sports & the Arts, which also placed the art pieces currently on view at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara. A dozen new works have been commissioned for Chase Center by the JP Morgan Chase Art Collection, which holds 30,000 objects. In all, there will be more than 50 pieces of art commissioned or loaned for either inside Chase Center or outside for Thrive City, the 11-acre free arts and entertainment district.
“Art is going to become one of the real draws for people to come visit Chase Center,” Welts said.
Welts declined to reveal how much the Warriors are spending on the art for Chase Center, but there is no cost for the pieces on loan by the JP Morgan Chase Art Collection and no rental fee for the pieces borrowed from SFMOMA.
“SFMOMA is more than ever interested in community and in expanding its reach,” said Janet Bishop, chief curator and curator of painting and sculpture. “This struck us as a wonderful opportunity to work directly on a project for a new building.”
During a recent site visit, Welts offered Bishop the best possible real estate: the two main points of entry, the west entrance from 16th Street and the east entrance from the bay, presumably via ferry.
Bishop immediately saw the potential for the Calder at the main entrance, with a ceiling four stories high. The painted metal sculpture will dangle down to a level 25 feet above ticket holders entering the arena.
“It will respond to the air currents in the lobby and the movement of visitors,” she said. “It is one of his classic large-scale mobiles that has a dynamic character.”
The Noguchi will be outdoors at the west entrance, where it will be kept company by other artworks.
Other locations identified for artwork are either side of the entry at the east entrance, closest to the bay. For these, Bishop commissioned Oakland painter David Huffman and the Dogpatch multimedia team of Amanda Hughen and Jennifer Starkweather. The artists were notified just two months ago — but Huffman had a head start. The Berkeley-raised artist is a lifelong Warriors fan and has been incorporating basketball imagery into his abstract paintings for a decade.
“For me, basketball is a black ballet with these unusual feats where the game became something that happened in the air,” Huffman said.
Working with Magnolia Prints, he has taken a piece called “Double Jump,” which he displayed at the Museum of the African Diaspora, and turned it into a 14-foot square piece in acrylic paint. It will hang at the entryway at Chase Center and will be visible through glass from outside the arena.
“I don’t make fan art,” Huffman said, which differentiates his work from the pieces coming from Sports & the Arts, “but I make art that is related to the African American experience, and basketball is certainly one of those subjects.”
Neither Starkweather nor Hughen has been to a Warriors game, but they understand teamwork, having joined forces at Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito when both were in residence.
The duo now call themselves Hughen/Starkweather and do deep historic and environmental research for their installations, which will include the Central Subway Station at Union Square, opening in 2020.
“Bridging the Bay,” their piece for Chase Center, is 7 feet tall and 26 feet long, comprising a map of the greater bay ecosystem both built and natural. It will cover infrastructure, shipping containers, airport runways, flocks of migrating birds and clouds of ladybugs, details not commonly seen on maps.
The concept is that as fans descend from a game or concert on an escalator, they will see the open bay through a wall of glass and can reference it on a locator map of gold leaf with hints of pink over an aluminum panel washed in blue. “Bridging the Bay” dates back to the era of marshes and forests and looks forward to future landscapes, ranging from San Francisco to Stockton. But it only includes one bridge: the Bay Bridge that will connect the East Bay to Chase Center.
“Even though this will very clearly be a map, it is an abstraction, with hints of figuration,” Hughen said. It will be placed just a few inches off the floor to allow for careful study.
Bishop said the partnership between Chase Center and SFMOMA is open-ended, and the museum curator envisions more loans and commissions to come.
“We’re all huge Warrior fans,” Bishop said.