There’s quite a bit to do and see at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center, with men’s and women’s professional basketball, boxing games, college basketball and hockey, concerts (Ariana Grande and Bruce Springsteen are on the bill this spring), restaurants, bars and a store featuring the Brooklyn Nets and New York Liberty. Next, Brooklyn Sports & Entertainment, the parent company of the Barclays Center, goes all out on the art. This fall, by Sarah Sze The wavefeaturing 250 moving image screens, will be installed in the arena’s atrium, followed by the installation of large-scale murals by Rashid Johnson and Mark Bradford at the new Flatbush Premium entrance. In the spring of 2027, Kambui Olujimi We Always Have Room for One More will go up to Ticketmaster Plaza.
Placing works of art in stadiums and arenas is nothing new. The first place to do so in a big way was Arlington, Texas’ AT&T Stadium (home of the Dallas Cowboys), which in 2009 featured the works of Doug AItken, Olafur Eliasson, Ellsworth Kelly, Julie Mehretu and many others. Several others have followed suit, including those used by baseball’s Florida Marlins, football’s Kansas City Chiefs, Minnesota Vikings, and basketball’s Golden State Warriors. What makes the Barclays Center’s embrace of the arts stand out is that it recently launched the world’s first residency program in sports. Paul Pfeiffer, the first artist who lived in this field, is well known in art, he has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Whitney and MCA Chicago, and works in the permanent collection of MoMA in New York, the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and other institutions in Europe.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, sports have always focused on his performance, including his 2000 video The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, which includes a series of basketball game photos, and a 2001 Long Count (Rumble in the Jungle), featuring the 1974 fight between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman—both of whom edited real athletes. In other works, Pfeiffer presents still images of basketball players with the ball removed or videos of basketball players moving the ball digitally edited, revealing the postures and gestures of the athletes. “He had this interest in the question: What is a player outside of the game? What is a player as a body?” Andria Hickey, an arts consultant at the Barclays Center, told the Observer. “This kind of question of movement in space and extracting other details of the game to check that form. So, that was also our main interest, his clear focus and investigation of basketball.”
Pfeiffer’s residency will be a collaboration with multidisciplinary artist Shaun Leonardo, whose social work explores social cohesion and experimental studies, often involving studies of masculinity, sports and race. The two artists will create a media workshop that will bring together “local stakeholders, artists and community partners, with the Barclays Center as the subject and site of inquiry,” explained Hickey. “We intentionally created a space to live without the expectation of producing a work of art, allowing artists time to observe, think and dream.”
This isn’t Pfeiffer’s first time getting involved with the sports scene. His audio-visual work Green Green Green Red examined operational justice through close-up shots of members of the University of Georgia Redcoat Marching Band and their conductors during and between football sessions. “Paul is well known for his work in other fields,” said Hickey. “He created a lot of films and video works and sound installations all related to the space and the spectacle of sports, and especially the stadium as a construction site. He also made sculptures about that. And he invested a lot in the whole infrastructure of how the stadium can be, from the people who work there, to the spectators, to consider the issue of how the game is framed. in a wider social and cultural change.”
The nominating art committee established in 2024—currently comprised of LACMA director Michael Govan and executive director Clara Kim, Serpentine director Hans Ulrich Obrist and Brooklyn Museum director Anne Pasternak—oversaw the selection of artists on the field, but the drive to bring more art to the area comes from co-owner Clara Wu Tsai. “It’s his passion to bring art, sports and social justice into the conversation,” Hickey said. “He is very excited about the idea of bringing art to non-traditional places and to non-traditional audiences.”
Sports fans and concertgoers probably know the basic rules—don’t touch the wall works, don’t ride on the sculptures and don’t vent your post-game rage with art—but it’s an experiment that sports venues have been doing. “People really respect art and don’t hurt it,” said Tracie Speca-Ventura, owner and president of California-based Sports & The Arts, which has installed artwork in more than 13 sports arenas across the country over the past 15 years. “Concession carts hurt works of art more than fans.” (He added that European soccer fans are louder than US sports fans by a long shot.)
Hickey agreed that safety is a priority. “We’re thinking about security, but we’re also working around it, if that’s the way to think about it, by working specifically with media and artists that make it easier to engage with large crowds who may have a lot of beer in their hands.” He added that artist LaToya Ruby Frazier’s large New York Liberty paintings, which have been re-installed on the Barclays’ suite level, have been viewed by “huge groups of people” who he found “really respectful.”
Another unsurprising fact about art in sports venues is that it often has a theme to it. The artwork at Arrowhead Stadium and US Bank Stadium celebrates regional artists in Kansas City and Minneapolis, respectively. But the large-scale artwork at AT&T Stadium isn’t about Dallas or sports and focuses more on marquee artists like Aitken, Mel Bochner, Eliasson, Kapoor, Jenny Holzer, Sol LeWitt, Mehretu, Odili Donald Odita and Lawrence Weiner. The gallery’s entire collection consists of 99 paintings, sculptures and photographs by 66 artists, and local school groups regularly visit the works. “Our family has always viewed AT&T Stadium as more than just the home of the Dallas Cowboys,” Charlotte Jones, owner and CEO of the Dallas Cowboys, told the Observer. “It was designed to be a cultural landmark where sports and art coexist in a way that no other arena has been able to match.”
Barclays is looking less at the AT&T model than at Arrowhead. “We’re interested in Brooklyn artists, of course, and we’ll be showcasing a lot of them, but we’re also very interested in bringing international artists to Brooklyn,” Hickey explained. “We wanted to really allow artists to be as creative as possible, be as inspired as possible, and follow their inspiration. So we didn’t create an umbrella theme. We just let the artists lead.”
Art works are out of place in these areas because “stadiums are not just for sports. These are event centers,” Speca-Ventura said, adding that “for sports franchises, art collections open up great marketing and publicity opportunities.” The audience for this marketing includes people planning weddings, high school proms, birthday parties, graduations, bar mitzvahs, corporate tours and themed events, as sports venues compete with hotels, historic homes, convention centers and museums for these and other events. As always, where there is commerce, you will find art.
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