There is quite a bit to do and see at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center, with men’s and women’s professional basketball, boxing matches, college basketball and hockey, concerts (Ariana Grande and Bruce Springsteen are on the docket for this spring), places to eat, places to drink and a store with Brooklyn Nets and New York Liberty merch. Next up, Brooklyn Sports & Entertainment, parent company of the Barclays Center, is going all in on art. This fall, Sarah Sze’s Wave, which consists of 250 screens projecting moving images, will be installed in the arena’s atrium, followed by the installation of large-scale paintings by Rashid Johnson and Mark Bradford in the new Flatbush Premium entrance. In the spring of 2027, Kambui Olujimi’s We Always Have Room For One More will go up on Ticketmaster Plaza.
Placing works of art in sports stadiums and arenas is not new. The first venue to do so in a big way was Arlington, Texas’s AT&T Stadium (home of the Dallas Cowboys), which in 2009 installed works by Doug AItken, Olafur Eliasson, Ellsworth Kelly, Julie Mehretu and many more. Several others followed suit, including those used by baseball’s Florida Marlins, football’s Kansas City Chiefs and Minnesota Vikings, and basketball’s Golden State Warriors. What makes the Barclays Center’s embrace of art notable is that it recently inaugurated the sports world’s first residency program. Paul Pfeiffer, the arena’s first artist-in-residence, is well-known in the art world, having been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Whitney and MCA Chicago, with works in the permanent collections of New York’s MoMA, the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and other institutions in Europe and South America.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, sports has been a sustained focus of his practice, including his 2000 video The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, which features a series of images of basketball games, and the 2001 The Long Count (The Rumble in the Jungle), which features the 1974 bout between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman—both of which edited out the actual athletes. In other works, Pfeiffer presents stills of basketball players with the ball removed or videos of basketball players in motion with the ball digitally edited out, revealing the athletes’ shapes and gestures. “He’s had this interest in the question: What is the player outside of the game? What is the player as a body?” Andria Hickey, artistic consultant to the Barclays Center, told Observer. “This sort of question of movement in space and taking out some of the specifics of the game to really examine that form. So, that was also a big interest of ours, his clear focus and investigation of basketball.”
Pfeiffer’s residency will be a collaboration with multidisciplinary artist Shaun Leonardo, whose social practice explores the intersection of community engagement and experimental pedagogies, often engaging the subjects of masculinity, sports and race. The two artists will create a media workshop bringing “together local participants, artists and community partners, with Barclays Center as both subject and site of inquiry,” Hickey explained. “We intentionally created the residency without the expectation of producing an artwork, allowing artists time to observe, think and dream.”
This isn’t Pfeiffer’s first time engaging with a sports venue. His audio and visual work Red Green Blue examined the mechanics of performance through close-up footage of University of Georgia Redcoat Marching Band members and their directors during and between periods of football play. “Paul is very well known for the work he’s done with other stadiums,” Hickey said. “He’s created a number of films and video works and sound installations that have all dealt with the space and spectacle of sport, and in particular the arena as an architectural space. He’s also made sculptures about that. And he’s very invested in the whole infrastructure of what a sports stadium can be, from the people that work there, to the audience, to the way that the cameras frame the game. He’s investigating that space as it relates to broader social and cultural changes.”
Nominations from an art committee formed in 2024—currently consisting of LACMA director Michael Govan and chief curator Clara Kim, Serpentine director Hans Ulrich Obrist and Brooklyn Museum director Anne Pasternak—guided the arena’s selection of artists, but the push to bring more art to the area came from co-owner Clara Wu Tsai. “It’s really a passion project of hers to bring art, sport and social justice into conversation,” Hickey said. “She’s very excited about the idea of bringing art to non-traditional spaces and non-traditional audiences.”
Sports fans and concert-goers probably know the basic rules—don’t touch wall works, don’t climb on sculptures and don’t take out your post-game aggressions on the art—but it is something of an experiment that sports venues have been conducting. “People really do respect the art and don’t damage them,” said Tracie Speca-Ventura, owner and president of the California-based company Sports & The Arts, which has installed artworks in more than 13 stadiums around the country over the past 15 years. “Concession carts damage artworks much more than fans do.” (She added that European soccer fans are rowdier than U.S. sports fans by a long shot.)
Hickey acknowledged that security is a priority. “We’re thinking about safety, but we’re also kind of working around it, if that’s a way to think about it, by specifically working with media and artists that make it easy for engagement with large crowds who may have a lot of beer in their hands.” She added that artist LaToya Ruby Frazier’s large-scale portraits of the New York Liberty, reinstalled at Barclays’ suite level, have been viewed by “large groups of people” whom she has found to be “quite respectful.”
Another less-than-surprising fact about art in sports venues is that it is often contextually themed. The artwork at Arrowhead Stadium and U.S. Bank Stadium celebrates regional artists in Kansas City and Minneapolis, respectively. But the large-scale artwork in AT&T Stadium is less about Dallas or sports and more focused on marquee artists such as Aitken, Mel Bochner, Eliasson, Kapoor, Jenny Holzer, Sol LeWitt, Mehretu, Odili Donald Odita and Lawrence Weiner. The stadium’s full collection consists of 99 paintings, sculptures and photographs by 66 artists, and local school groups regularly tour the works. “Our family always envisioned AT&T Stadium as more than just the home of the Dallas Cowboys,” Charlotte Jones, co-owner and chief brand officer of the Dallas Cowboys, told Observer. “It was designed to be a cultural landmark where sports and art exist side-by-side in a way that no other stadium has been able to replicate.”
Barclays veers a bit more toward the AT&T model than toward Arrowhead. “We are interested in Brooklyn artists, of course, and we will be showcasing a number of them, but we’re also really interested in bringing international global artists to Brooklyn,” Hickey explained. “We wanted to really allow the artists to be as creative as possible, to be as inspired as possible, and to follow their own inspiration. And so we did not create an umbrella theme. We are simply letting the artists lead.”
Artworks are not out of place in these venues because “sports arenas are not just for sports. These are event centers,” Speca-Ventura said, adding that “for sports franchises, an art collection opens up marketing opportunities and very good press.” The audience for this marketing includes people planning weddings, high school proms, birthday parties, graduations, bar mitzvahs, corporate outings and themed events, as sports venues compete with hotels, historic homes, convention centers and museums for these and other events. As usual, where there’s commerce, you’ll also find art.
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