San Francisco Museum of the African Diaspora debuts ‘Love + Basketball’ alongside NBA All-Star game
The Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) in San Francisco announces the exhibition “Love + Basketball: My Freedom Gotta Rim On It,” a solo exhibition by Houston-based artist Ann Johnson opening on February 5 and continuing through March 2, 2025. Coinciding with the NBA All-Star Weekend in San Francisco as well as Black History Month, the exhibition will present Johnson’s first-ever solo museum show on the West Coast featuring works that closely examine basketball through the lens of consumerism, materialism, success, and aspiration.
The exhibition is curated by Key Jo Lee, MoAD’s Chief of Curatorial Affairs and Public Programs, who selected Johnson’s submission following a global open call for artists in Fall 2024.
“Alongside the NBA All-Star Weekend and our celebration of Black History Month, ‘Love + Basketball’ is one of the first exhibitions kicking off MoAD’s 20th anniversary year,” Monetta White, Executive Director and CEO of MoAD, said. “Basketball is a story intrinsic to Black America, and offers countless lessons of our excellence, resistance, and economic mobility. Ann Johnson’s work, in particular, poignantly covers so much of this experience through her art.”
With a nearly three decade-long career, Ann Johnson has been working as an interdisciplinary artist, teacher, and community advocate in Houston, having participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions throughout Texas and across the United States. At MoAD she will be presenting a range of new assemblage, video, and sculptural works that explore the complexities of how basketball is seen as a means of social mobility within the Black community, based on her firsthand experience within Houston’s inner city wards.
On view will be seven BlingCatchers from 2002 through 2024, as part of her series that uses standard basketball hoops affixed with referential signifiers of material success. From these works dangle objects such as Air Jordan sneakers, beads, as well as gold or silver jewelry in the shape of crosses or dollar signs. Importantly, Johnson utilizes the dreamcatcher form, to emphasize the fantasy of basketball and bling as not just aspirational, but also protective.
“Though it was originally created to engage ‘incorrigible’ young white men, in many ways, basketball has become synonymous with Black culture. Because it lives at the intersection of race, politics, economics and popular culture, basketball remains both familiar and fascinating to many artists, whether Barkley L. Hendricks’ 1970s canvases, shaped to reflect the various geometries of the basketball court, or Lauren Halsey’s, David Huffman’s, or Hank Willis Thomas’s more contemporary gestures,” said Key Jo Lee, MoAD’s Chief of Curatorial Affairs and Public Programs. “Ann’s work powerfully removes the figure of the player, and thus the Black body, as the object of contemplation. Instead, the artist investigates critical questions about freedom, success and ‘uplifts’ via bejeweled backboards and ornamented hoops.”
In relation to the BlingCatcher hoops, the show includes a short video titled My Freedom Gotta Rim On It in which the central figure repeats the phrase “my freedom gotta rim on it,” interrogating basketball’s potential to create true autonomy. This directly connects with the sculptural piece Freedom Dreamin (2024), as part of Johnson’s new, experimental practice involving dye transfer printing onto brick, with depictions of youths from Houston’s historically Black Fourth Ward known as Freedmen’s Town. In dialogue with her BlingCatcher pieces, these works collectively question the complex social forces that temper ambition and inform perceptions of advancement and success.
