Fast-forward to two years ago, when Barney released Drawing Restraint 28, a film of artist Alex Katz not just as a painter but as an athlete. In the three-channel video, Katz, 98, uses his physical body in a concrete space, his outstretched, powerful arms punching up to certain parts of the canvas, his brush-stuck fingers making a detailed hot orange depiction of a road near his house in Maine. The nonagenarian in a studio gridiron is fighting a physical battle. Painting is a sport to be won.
Katz, a lifelong NBA fan, joins Bill Bradley, the former star of the Princeton basketball team and a two-time NBA champion with the New York Knicks, in a portrait by Joshua Woods. Bradley was performing miracles on the court in central Jersey back in the 1960s, right around when Katz was first making a name for himself in Greenwich Village. They both went on to illustrious career heights afterward: the Senate for Bradley, the Guggenheim for Katz.
NATHANIEL MARY QUINN AND MISTY COPELAND There’s perhaps no better painter of the body in motion right now than Nathaniel Mary Quinn. So it’s natural that the nation’s foremost ballet artist, Misty Copeland, is drawn to his works and installed one work on paper in her Upper West Side apartment. Quinn is a fan of Copeland as well, and on a recent visit to his Bedford-Stuyvesant studio, he picked up some brushes as she began a spontaneous dance.
Artist LaToya Ruby Frazier spent time with the New York Liberty as part of her commission for the WNBA team’s home at Barclays Center, getting to know players and their friends and family, photographing all of them for the project. Frazier worked especially closely with Betnijah Laney-Hamilton, creating a photo-based artwork that features Laney-Hamilton’s mother, exploring the origin of her portmanteau first name.
AMAR’E STOUDEMIRE AND ROB PRUITT When Amar’e Stoudemire first started collecting art, he was drawn to painter Rob Pruitt’s unapologetically glittery visions. So Stoudemire did what he would do for anyone he admired: He invited Pruitt to watch him at work, courtside at a Knicks game. “After the game we became friends. He invited my family over to the studio. We painted, we talked, we had coffee,” the athlete said in 2016. Since that first visit to the studio, Stoudemire has acquired several of Pruitt’s paintings of pandas, some of which were gifts from the artist, and returned for a friendly game of chess.
