Curatorial Statement: And The Crowd Goes Wild
- Published:
October 15th, 2025
Sport is far more than a game. Group exhibition And The Crowd Goes Wild positions the athletic arena as a microcosm of society—a space where power, performance, and discipline collide, and dominant values are both reinforced and contested. From the playing field to behind-the-scenes moments in the locker room, our visual and auditory experience of sport is engineered to intensify excitement and allegiance.
Joshua Alexander's S N E A K S transforms the familiar squeak of sneakers on the court into an anchor for rethinking the spectacle of sport. By shifting focus from the visual saturation of logos, scoreboards, and motion to the fleeting sonic detail of play, his work highlights how attention itself is shaped, redirected, and sold within the athletic arena. In doing so, Alexander underscores the subtle ways sound can reveal the energy—and the economy—of sport.
Level the Playing Field by Naomi Even-Aberle and Jamie Zimchek transforms the structure of a basketball court into a stage where fairness unravels and power is laid bare. Through malfunctioning scoreboards, obstructive nets, and soft, unusable equipment, the installation dismantles the illusion of clarity and equal opportunity in sport. Their work adds a playful yet incisive critique to And the Crowd Goes Wild, revealing how the rules and tools we take for granted in athletics often echo broader systems of inequity, exclusion, and contested belonging.
Marian Lyndgaard expands the exhibition’s lens by connecting the world of athletics to the histories of land and power. Track and Field 1-6, embroidered assemblages, parallels the circular confinement of the racetrack with the rigid grids of industrial farming on the prairie, revealing how both mirror colonial systems of order, control, and erasure. Yet her work also gestures toward possibility: in reimagining competition along trails and back roads, Lyndgaard invites us to envision forms of movement unbound by imposed structures.
Drawing on her experience as an athlete, Jessica Lambert identifies parallels between the arena and the gallery. In Locker Room, she reimagines practical sporting equipment as fragile paper locker templates. In Route I–V, she transforms field markers into framed drawings that map bodily movement, shifting their role from marking territory on the field to charting the presence of the body in space. Across both works, Lambert destabilizes the functionality of familiar athletic forms and repositions them as sites of reflection rather than utility.
In their All-American video series, Martinez E-B and A.J. Bermudez add a critical layer by reframing the language of sport as a lens for national identity and belonging. Drawing from sports terminology that signals idealized excellence, E-B and Bermudez reclaim the phrase to examine race, nationalism, and inclusion in the American narrative. The work highlights how a seemingly celebratory expression—“All American”—is not neutral, but bound up in contested histories of visibility and erasure. By inviting declarations from diverse voices across the country, the project becomes a living dialogue that complicates what it means to belong, to represent, and to be seen as emblematic of the nation.
Judy Takács offers a compelling twist on a common phrase in her portrait series Chick With Balls. More than a playful pun, the series reclaims the language of sport to highlight the resilience and quiet heroism of women whose contributions often go unrecognized. By blending humor with reverence, Takács celebrates the female form in its honesty and variety, challenging narrow ideals of beauty while inviting viewers to see courage in everyday lives.
A familiar exclamation from sports broadcasts, “and the crowd goes wild!” instantly evokes collective euphoria. This exhibition replays this phrase as a catalyst for deeper questioning of what fuels the frenzy. What are we really cheering for? What does our enthusiasm empower? This signal to popular culture becomes an entry point for deeper inquiry, setting the tone for an exhibition that balances playful spectacle with cultural critique.