Contemporary Art and Sports Come Together at SFMOMA

Alongside paintings and sculptures, racecar steering wheels and surfboards line the walls of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art for its latest—and largest-ever—exhibition. Get in the Game: Sports, Art, Culture opens on Saturday, October 19, and runs through February 18, 2025.

Get in the Game: Sports, Art, Culture is SFMOMA’s most expansive exhibition on a single subject. Exploring the impact of sports on contemporary visual culture, the show spans over 15,000 square feet and comprises over 200 artworks and design objects. Curators at the SFMOMA intentionally arranged the exhibition without a clear beginning or end point. Instead, visitors are invited to “choose their own adventure” through the wide-ranging lineup of objects. Get in the Game features paintings, sculptures, sports gear, apparel, photography, film, and interactive installations.

“The exhibition creates space for dynamic conversations about identity, physicality, passion, ambition, resilience, and so much more,” said Christopher Bedford, the Helen and Charles Schwab Director of SFMOMA. “We welcome the public to experience this unique opportunity to look anew at the inspiring ways that sports, art, design, and culture intersect.”

SFMOMA Exhibition Themes

The SFMOMA exhibition is at once playful and provocative. SFMOMA curator Jennifer Dunlop Fletcher and research director Katy Siegel, as well as independent curator and writer Seph Rodney, organized Get in the Game according to five themes that explore the crossovers and connections between sports and visual culture. “Winning and Losing” emphasizes the highs and lows of competition, while “Mind and Body” exposes the dark side of pushing one’s body to the limit. “A Fan’s Life” explores the collective cultural experience—and extremities—of fandom, while “Breaking Records, Breaking Rules” spotlights stories of social and political disruption in sports. “Field of Play” looks at how games are played through the lenses of fashion, product design, and place.

“Sports is a great connector,” said Fletcher. “[It] tangentially has broadened conversation on several related topics, such as labor, class, race, gender, sexuality, and physical and mental health.” As such, the SFMOMA exhibition features works like Open Swim by Derek Fordjour (2021), a mixed-media work that depicts Black swimmers in a pool. Fordjour’s work “speaks to segregation and the 1960s when Black people were still limited to one hour to use (municipal) pools,” explained Fletcher. “In different spaces and times, we see different behaviors, inequalities.”

Other artists represented in Get in the Game are athletes themselves, including one former Olympian and several who relied on athletic scholarships to fund their university art degrees. The SFMOMA exhibition also features interactive art. Gabriel Orozco’s Ping Pond Table arranges four curved ping pong tables around a square pool of water. “You get to decide the rules with friends or strangers you meet,” said Fletcher. “You play with the art and make the sport together.”