Field Goal, Goal Tend
Year: 2022

Installation process



Smokless tobacco and coffee ground mixture for the natural material/product used to create imprint for hand slapping the basketball backbord.

See “Proof of Flight”

Ania Szremski:

Field Goal, Goal Tend draws on this deep history and links it to present modes of discipline, surveillance, and labor that exist in the field of sports. The work includes a sculpture of a fan-shaped basketball blackboard covered with handprints stained from nicotine chew and other farmed products. Above the sculpture, a CCTV camera streams a live feed of visitors in the gallery—prompting the viewer to become conscious of their own surveillance as they observe Black art and the Black subject in history, and their own relationship to all those things.

The work also includes yellow gym wall pads beneath the sculpture and yellow barricades surrounding it. On the road, yellow is a color of caution, of yielding. But yellow can be many more things besides. For washington-queen, it can be the color of optimism, a color of the mind, a color that prompts mental agility and heightened perception. The artist associates the color yellow with the themes engaged by their research and the resulting artworks they create. Yellow is the hopeful color of the freedom that foregrounds this exhibition—a freedom that requires creativity, improvisation, and artfulness to be achieved.