“Guernica” hangs prominently on the seventh floor of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, its haphazard forms, oversized limbs and frenetic energy urging visitors to pause and contemplate what it all means.
Oh, this isn’t that “Guernica,” Picasso’s monochromatic antiwar painting of 1937 that hangs in the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid. This one is a collage-style quilt from 2016 by the Brooklyn artist Hank Willis Thomas, a colorful jumble of basketball jerseys bearing names and numbers of famous NBA players from different eras. Are they all teammates or adversaries? Are they meant to stir debate over who was the greatest? Or are they reminders that athletes fight for victory just as Picasso’s fallen soldier did? The viewer decides.
These are the kinds of questions that SFMOMA’s newest exhibition, “Get in the Game,” is meant to provoke. Using sports-related art and design objects to spark conversations of representation and purpose, it’s the museum’s largest show since its founding in 1935, taking up the entire seventh floor with related exhibits on floors below. Altogether, it’s an eclectic mix of more than 200 paintings, drawings, photographs, videos, athletic shoes, pennants, banners, trading cards, skateboards, computer game consoles, Formula 1 steering wheels, football helmets and a foosball game large enough for 22 players. [...]
The final section, “Mind and Body,” explores the interconnectedness of physical and mental activity. Shaun Leonardo does it through a pair of charcoal drawings of brain scans of athletes who suffered brain damage from the violence they experienced in competition.
