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Why Sports Venues Are Betting Big on Fine Art

"For sports franchises, an art collection opens up marketing opportunities and very good press."

There is quite a bit to do and see at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center, with men’s and women’s professional basketball, boxing matches, college basketball and hockey, concerts (Ariana Grande and Bruce Springsteen are on the docket for this spring), places to eat, places to drink and a store with Brooklyn Nets and New York Liberty merch. Next up, Brooklyn Sports & Entertainment, parent company of the Barclays Center, is going all in on art. This fall, Sarah Sze’s Wave, which consists of 250 screens projecting moving images, will be installed in the arena’s atrium, followed by the installation of large-scale paintings by Rashid Johnson and Mark Bradford in the new Flatbush Premium entrance. In the spring of 2027, Kambui Olujimi’s We Always Have Room For One More will go up on Ticketmaster Plaza.

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Placing works of art in sports stadiums and arenas is not new. The first venue to do so in a big way was Arlington, Texas’s AT&T Stadium (home of the Dallas Cowboys), which in 2009 installed works by Doug AItken, Olafur Eliasson, Ellsworth Kelly, Julie Mehretu and many more. Several others followed suit, including those used by baseball’s Florida Marlins, football’s Kansas City Chiefs and Minnesota Vikings, and basketball’s Golden State Warriors. What makes the Barclays Center’s embrace of art notable is that it recently inaugurated the sports world’s first residency program. Paul Pfeiffer, the arena’s first artist-in-residence, is well-known in the art world, having been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Whitney and MCA Chicago, with works in the permanent collections of New York’s MoMA, the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and other institutions in Europe and South America.

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