Scoreboard: Brooke Stewart: Solo Exhibition
Opening Reception:
November 6, 6:00 - 8:00 pm
Artist Talk moderated by Dina Deitsch, Ruth Shapiro ’37 Director of the
Davis Museum at Wellesley College
December 1, 6:30 - 7:30 pm. Registration here for free tickets.
For the final exhibition of our inaugural year in Downtown Boston, Praise Shadows is thrilled to announce Scoreboard, Brooke Stewart’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. A former Division I college basketball player, Stewart’s experiences as an athlete and artist are deeply entwined. For Scoreboard, she has developed a new suite of paintings that celebrates pivotal moments in women’s professional sports, while employing the scoreboard's graphical text-based design to make playful allusions to gender equality, representation, and the politics of professional sports. The relationship between the athlete’s body and the arena of sport, along with the demands of physical endurance, evokes durational performance art practices, particularly feminist artists of the mid-to-late 20th century, who used their bodies as statements and as protest. The artist’s exploration of text-based media using the format of scoreboards, meanwhile, suggests that her paintings are declarations and not simply observations. In another piece — a large-scale mixed-media scoreboard on stained glass and wood panel, which adorns the gallery’s prominent window facade — the artist makes her most personal proclamation to date: LOVE THE GAME. PERIOD.
Two of the paintings use panels made to scale in order to directly reference consequential moments in the socio-political history of sports. In one, Stewart re-created the tennis court at the Houston Astrodome in 1973, where Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs squared off in the Battle of the Sexes. King won in three straight sets, beating the self-proclaimed “male chauvinist” and former men’s champion. Stewart’s painting — using oil, acrylic, color pencil, and paint additives on wood panel — showcases the simple symmetricality of the tennis court. The work includes a separate mosaic-tile scoreboard that displays boldly “KINGS / RIGGS” and “6–4, 6–3, 6–3,” acknowledging both the pixelated low-fi quality of circa-1970s scoreboards as well as the live televised broadcast witnessed by 90 million people worldwide, helping to catapult women’s tennis into a new era.
The largest painting in the exhibition depicts the first game in the history of the WNBA, in 1997, at the Great Western Forum in Inglewood, California between the Los Angeles Sparks and the New York Liberty, an occasion that marked the dawn of a new era of visibility for women in professional sports. The painting depicts the tip off, acknowledging the start of the game and a new era. The corresponding mosaic scoreboard reads “57-67” and “HOME / GUEST.”
The ubiquity of the clock and of the orientation of sports around the limitations of time are what prompted Stewart to begin to think about connections with the sun and the body’s own internal clock. She was inspired to use light as a medium within the work, which in turn, led her to the notion of a scoreboard rendered in stained glass, something reminiscent of the stained-glass windows she passes on her daily commute to the studio through historic Boston neighborhoods. Much like a scoreboard coming alive with light, these colorful windows are only truly activated with the sun. Set within a custom wood stand, the front of the work reads “LOVE THE GAME. PERIOD” and on the reverse is a painted, pixelated message — a tribute to her father’s ceaseless reminder: “IT WILL LOVE YOU BACK.”
In addition to the paintings, Stewart has created four limited-edition etchings, which she made upon learning about the trio of women — Lisa Lindahl, Hinda Miller, and Polly Palmer Smith — who invented the sports bra in 1977. Inspired by their process, Stewart ordered a brand of jockstraps named ‘Shock Doctor,’ then cut them into pieces and sewed them back together in the shape of a bra. She was struck by the word shock, knowing that Pierre de Coubertin, founder of the modern Olympic movement, used that same word to exclude women, arguing that women’s bodies were not built to withstand the “shocks” of sport. The etchings document this invention: the front and back of the Shock Doctor jockstrap, and the front and back of the doubled and reconstructed version, aka the sports bra.
