Get in the Game: Sports, Art, Culture

book design for SFMOMA
Illustrator: AJ Dungo
edited by: Jennifer Dunlop Fletcher, Seph Rodney & Katy Siegel
introduction: Megan Rapinoe

From Jennifer Dunlop Fletcher & Katy Siegel's introduction:
Get in the Game: Sports, Art, Culture explores the intersections of art and sports and the ways that they reflect and shape contemporary debates about physical experience, identity, and society. As with other forms of cultural expression, art and sports have become serious business, rewarding the artists and athletes who perform with the most discipline, brilliance, grace, and power, and also putting enormous pressure on them. Despite this professionalization, the two realms share a common root in play and games. Philosophers from Aristotle to Friedrich Schiller have defined play as something we do not out of necessity but for love: freely undertaken, it allows us to shed the constraints of everyday survival. Play becomes a game or sport when you add rules and competition, rolling back the element of freedom and replacing it with a commonly held structure defined by boundaries, regulations, and obstacles to overcome.... Art and sports celebrate the human mind and body, and they reward genius, the extraordinary individual who is simply better than everyone else. They each have their respective GOATS, and arguing about the pantheon is a kind of bracket played in both fields: Picasso versus Matisse, Jordan versus LeBron.

164 pages
6.75 x 9 inches