Contemporary Art installations unveiled at Intuit Dome in L.A.

Six commissioned public artworks will welcome guests to the new home of the National Basketball Association’s LA Clippers, Intuit Dome. Transforming the campus into an inclusive gathering place, the world-class murals, digital installations, and sculpture made specifically for the site will invite visitors into a celebration of community and the power of creative spirit.

A seventh major commissioned artwork, by Charles Gaines, will be unveiled at a later date.

To offer this experience to the Inglewood community and millions of fans, the Clippers employed art consultant Ruth Berson of Berson Studio LLC to engage a jury including members of the local community to select an all-star team of locally based artists: Refik Anadol, Glenn Kaino, Patrick Martinez, Michael Massenburg, Kyungmi Shin, and Jennifer Steinkamp.

“We designed Intuit Dome to be a place that brings people together,” Gillian Zucker, CEO of Halo Sports & Entertainment, parent company of the Clippers, said. “When it came to our public art, we wanted to deliver a collection that is as compelling to people well-versed in art as it is to a novice viewer. We are eager to make these unique works, from these amazing artists, available to everyone when Intuit Dome opens in August.”

Adding to the creative experience of Intuit Dome, the Clippers commissioned MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” winner Walter J. Hood, founder and creative director of Hood Design Studio, to design the landscape of Intuit Dome’s campus, internationally acclaimed fashion photographer and filmmaker Glen Luchford created player portrait photographs to be installed inside the arena, and renowned visual artist Jonas Wood to design the LA Clippers City Edition uniforms and court. At opening, Intuit Dome will also feature an exhibition of photographs by Catherine Opie, on loan from MOCA, evoking the experience of community.

“Our goal has been to make Intuit Dome’s plaza a special place that brings world-class art to Inglewood and beyond, inviting people to gather and enjoy these artworks in a space that welcomes everyone,” Berson said. “In commissioning these works, we started conversations with these extraordinary artists who have deep ties to Los Angeles and together reflect the make-up of the Inglewood community. We showed them the model of the Intuit Dome and its campus. They chose options for their sites, and over the course of a year, they refined their ideas into the major new artworks unveiled today.”

Intuit Dome Public Artworks

Standing in front of the main entrance to Intuit Dome, Glenn Kaino’s massive sculpture Sails, made of painted steel and wood and measuring 41’ 7 ¼” by 28’ 11 ¼” by 58’ 10 ½”, looms in the form of the clipper ships that connected the world via the ocean’s trade routes. The historic clipper ships were propelled by the wind in their billowing sails, but in Kaino’s sculpture, the unfurled sails on the tall masts are made of backboards and hoops inspired by images of diverse courts around the world, both formal and improvisational. In this ship, basketball is the cultural wind that can connect us all.

As suggested in an interview the artist conducted with Ambassador Andrew Young, who alongside Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. used pick-up basketball games to help recruit young men to join the Civil Rights movement, both art and sports can propel today’s search for social justice.

The entire surface of the Intuit Dome itself, designed by the architectural firm AECOM, provides the background and material for Jennifer Steinkamp’s digital artwork Swoosh. Five animations will transform the surface of the dome, weaving fluidly around the structure’s geometric panels and referencing tangible yet invisible forces of nature such as wind and gravity. The dome will come alive with emotion as it lights up the night sky.

Bordering the Intuit Dome’s plaza, behind the campus’s outdoor community basketball court, stands a new digital artwork by Refik Anadol titled Living Arena, displayed on an LED screen 40 feet tall by 70 feet wide. Created in collaboration with cutting-edge artificial intelligence algorithms, the work presents a mesmerizing, continually changing data narrative in four chapters.

The abstract images in each chapter visualize data from different sources. “Urban Dreams” features flight information from nearby LAX and other airports around the globe; “Nature Dreams” displays live weather data from Inglewood including wind direction, temperature, and humidity; “Culture Dreams” showcases player tracking data from historic Clippers games; and “California Landscape” highlights images from the state’s national parks. The AI-driven artwork provides a unique, ever-evolving visual experience that connects the digital and physical worlds through data.

Across the plaza from Living Arena will be Patrick Martinez’s sculpture Same Boat. Using one of the modern city’s most common visual forms—the neon sign—Martinez creates an image in glowing light, approximately nine feet square, that reproduces a statement by the late Civil Rights leader Whitney M. Young: “We may have all come on different ships but we’re in the same boat now.”

Conveying faith in our shared humanity despite society’s forces of division, the work speaks to the spirit of inclusion while alluding playfully to the Clippers’ nautical team name.

On a wall adjacent to Same Boat, visitors will find Kyungmi Shin’s stained glass mosaic with stainless steel tracery, Spring to Life. For this work, measuring 22.75 feet by 7.5 feet, Shin drew inspiration from Centinela Springs, the now-vanished water source in South Los Angeles that once supported the Tongva people and the land they cultivated. Creating a narrative that connects the past to today’s LA, Shin superimposes the silhouettes of basketball players over her depiction of Centinela Springs, suggesting the layers of human experience embedded in the site of the new arena.

For many visitors to the Intuit Dome, or motorists driving by, the first artwork to come into view will be Michael Massenburg’s joyful mural of printed porcelain enamel on steel panel, titled Cultural Playground. Installed so that it faces outward from the campus, the immense montage of the sights and sounds of Los Angeles, 25 feet tall and 100 feet wide, expresses the artist’s belief that “the two most profound things that unite people are the arts and sports.”

Figures of basketball, tennis, and soccer players, singers, musicians, and dancers play across the mural, in settings that range from Inglewood’s legendary Fox Theatre to the red-lanterned plazas of Chinatown to the city’s parks.

About the Intuit Dome Artists

Refik Anadol (b. 1985, Istanbul) is an internationally renowned media artist, director, and pioneer in the aesthetics of data and machine intelligence. He is the director of Refik Anadol Studio in Los Angeles and a lecturer in UCLA’s Department of Design Media Arts.

Anadol’s work locates creativity at the intersection of humans and machines. Taking the data that surrounds us as primary material, and the neural network of a computerized mind as a collaborator, his projects offer us radical visualizations of our digitized memories and expand the possibilities of interdisciplinary arts. Anadol’s site-specific data paintings and sculptures, live audio/visual performances, and immersive installations take many forms, while encouraging us to rethink our engagement with the physical world, collective experiences, public art, decentralized networks, and the creative potential of AI. https://refikanadol.com/

Charles Gaines (b. 1940, Charleston, South Carolina) has since the 1970s investigated the tenets of conceptual art, applying mathematical formulas, grid structures, and other rational systems to explore the innate conflict between subjective and objective awareness of the world. As one of the few African American artists working in conceptual art during its inception, Gaines made art that was often by default considered political, though his insights into racial and social issues come directly from the work itself.

His process for reducing the visual characteristics of a tree into a grid of colored and numbered cells, for example, could also be applied to how one depicts race or any other attribute—a system of representation that is both rational and infinitely variable. Gaines has also been prolific as a writer on philosophy and art history and as a teacher.

He lives and works in Los Angeles and recently retired from his 30-year post on the faculty of the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts). https://www.hauserwirth.com/artists/21845-charles-gaines/

Glenn Kaino (b. 1972, Los Angeles) is an artist known internationally for his expansive vision and activist-minded practice, which encompasses painting, sculpture, installation, performance, monumental public art, theatrical production, and feature film. Examining a wide range of political, social, and environmental issues in his work, Kaino takes a multidisciplinary and collaborative approach to art making.

His work brings together systems of knowledge, forms of production, and people that do not normally have a chance to connect, and often involves long-term partnerships with a diverse array of visionary collaborators.

Kaino is also an Emmy and Webby Award-winning producer and documentarian, whose films have been featured at the Tribeca Film Festival and SXSW. https://www.glennkainostudio.com/

The landscape and people of Los Angeles are among the principal subjects in the work of Patrick Martinez (b. 1980, Pasadena), as his wide-ranging practice explores themes of diversity, immigration, and racism. He is known for a variety of painting styles: his brightly colored mixed-media landscape paintings represent the city through abstract collages of surface materials, including stucco, spray paint, ceramic tiles, and vinyl signage; his neon works mimic the look of storefront street signs but present assertive messages of defiance, resilience, or inspiration.

Throughout his work—including his early Pee Chee paintings in which he addresses the experience of police harassment and brutality—is a deeply personal concern for social justice.  https://www.cjamesgallery.com/artists/patrick-martinez

Michael Massenburg (b. 1959, San Diego) was raised in South Central Los Angeles and resides in Inglewood. He began his career at the nearby Watts Tower Art Center, an institution dedicated to promoting populist art and multiculturalism. Like the generations of artists influenced by the 1965 Watts Rebellion and the Rodney King riots of 1992, Massenburg has in turn pursued the connection between personal and historical narratives, especially within the African Diaspora, and developed a practice that is culturally and socially engaged.

A boundless “sense of social purpose” has sustained him through the evolution of his work, from paintings and murals to public artworks, and propelled him into teaching, lecturing, activism, and community building. https://www.michaelmassenburg.com/

Through painting, sculpture, photography, and video, Kyungmi Shin (b. 1963, Busan, S. Korea) investigates the narratives of global culture — colonization, immigration, and cultural exchange. Working frequently in large-scale photo collage, Shin explores the mechanisms of global connectedness, both the literal and the imagined. She has been a Californian since her family immigrated to LA when she was 19, so her awareness of cultural collision is both acute and personal.

In her collages she layers images of Asian and Western culture, juxtaposing the historic with the contemporary, the personal with the universal. For her public artworks, Shin practices “listening to and learning from” the site itself, to reveal its history and its meaning. https://www.kyungmishin.com/

Jennifer Steinkamp (b. 1958, Denver) is an installation artist who works with video and digital media to explore ideas about architectural space, movement, and perception. Steinkamp’s time-based site-specific projections transform the way space is perceived and experienced. 

A consistent current in her work is her fascination with the incorporeal in nature and science. She believes there is so much more in the universe than what we sense and feel; we are surrounded by sentience in all life-forms. With the computer she communicates this conviction, referencing the tangible but invisible forces in air and the uncanny forms and motion of plants.

Steinkamp, who has lived, studied, and worked in LA since 1979, recently retired as a professor in UCLA’s Department of Design Media Arts. https://jsteinkamp.com/