Interview: David Berliner Gives a Tour of the Art at Barclays Center

The Barclays Center, home of the Brooklyn Nets, is also home to a series of art commissions that will only multiply in the months and years to come. The stadium currently has one-of-a-kind pieces by José Parlá, Mickalene Thomas, and OpenEndedGroup, in addition to a new series of photographs celebrating The Black Fives, a series of African-American basketball teams in Brooklyn before the racial integration of the NBA.

Board member and executive director, David Berliner, gave us a behind-the-scenes tour of the art pieces they have at The Barclays Center so far. Of the decision to have art there, he says,

"The idea of putting art somewhere that isn't a museum is interesting to me, because people don’t know what they are going to get, and they can start to see something in a new way. That’s why I like putting art in this place, because people don’t come here for the art. In the first year alone, this building will have 2.6 million people come through it. It's just the idea of exposing people to this art. It’s amazing when you think about how much power we have."

Interview: David Berliner Gives a Tour of the Art at Barclay's Center

"José Parlá started out as a graffiti artist. He’s Cuban-American, and his family, like many other Cuban families, came to Miami and spent a lot of time there before moving to New York. He bought and lives/works out of the old Spike Lee studio just two blocks away. He started out doing graffiti work and graduated with a fine arts degree.

His studio was too small to accommodate a piece of this scale, because he really wanted to make this as a single piece instead of in parts. It was important for him to see the scale all at once, because the colors move, so we gave him studio space in one of the buildings we have on site, and then we moved it over.

José is very interested in this whole typography. He wanted to convey his own experience of being an immigrant and a young artist in Brooklyn, so he uses typography as a way of experimenting and sharing his world. While the words are not necessarily legible, some of them can be made out like 'Dekalb' for Dekalb Avenue.

This piece is major for us, because you can see it from the exterior of the building; you don’t need a ticket to see it. The Brooklyn Academy of Music also has a piece of his that is visible from the street, which is cool because it's a real neighborhood connection, and it relates to what we are trying to do in reaching out to the cultural community."

"So this is a mural by Mickalene Thomas, another Brooklyn artist whose studio is not too far from here. We had the idea of creating a major mural in this space, because this is the suite level. She wanted to create a photo collage with a painting over it that had Brooklyn’s landmarks, and in total, it's 130-feet long and 22-feet high.

It took a few weeks to install. It was really down to the wire, because the whole building was down to the wire. We had the Jay-Z concert scheduled, and the day before, this place wasn’t done. We had these pre-opening events where we were introducing this to the neighborhood, and Mickalene's piece wasn’t finished yet. She didn’t want people to see it in-progress, so we draped this entire area and made it off-limits. She had a crew of assistants who were here literally through the night. At the time, she was about to have a baby and was putting on her show at the Brooklyn Museum.

She did an amazing job of incorporating the columns into this; it's just brilliant. You can see the painting by hand. She is very careful, she wants to make sure her work is presented in a certain way. She was actually playing with the piece up until it was presented. She introduced two new colors the day before it debuted. This combines landscapes both in color and material."

"This piece is about eleven minutes long. He actually did the dance himself wearing sensors that mapped his body. They don't play in unison, so one is a little ahead of the other. They were really clear that they wanted separate portals and more than one video screen. You get a sense of movement and body. There's something about this; it's not sports, but it's athletic."

"These are images of The Black Fives, a basketball league that existed from 1904 to the 1950s. These are actually images of the Brooklyn team called the Smart Set, who we discovered through Claude Johnson, who had an archive of these photos.

People have responded really well to them, because they are about Brooklyn and sports, but they are also about what is going on here now. It was a lot of work. Pentagram worked on the images a lot, and then we realized that Mickalene's studio assistant has an amazing photographic ability, so we engaged him to really sharpen up some of these images. We had to restore and re-map constantly."