The Oakland-based artist talks about his approach, filling a forty-two-foot-long wall, and basketball’s role in his Bay Area Walls commission Portals.
I Was Just Experimenting
In conceiving this work, understanding the space was first. I do large abstract paintings, but not forty-two feet long! Originally, I was going to show an abstract work, but it wasn’t coming together. I had a few paintings with basketball courts that I had done in 2006, like the ones I later painted for this mural. On my computer, on a whim, I took part of an image from one painting and used it to fill the mock-up of the wall. I was just experimenting. It was so different from my other work, but it felt right.
Basketball and Black Identity
Social abstraction is my term for the work that I do. This piece is less about the abstract and more about the social side, exploring basketball as an element of Black identity, particularly African American identity and culture. It’s a kind of urban vernacular. Growing up in Berkeley, most of us African American kids were playing basketball in parks until lights out, so it’s my personal experience.
Socio-Political Panoramics
This project is what I call a “panoramic,” a horizontal work with, in this case, three paintings featuring basketball courts. My basketball court paintings originated from my interest in another kind of court painting, of the Chinese imperial court from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Those paintings [example below] show emperors in celebrations or events, like scenes of a movie. It’s an atemporal space, a place of freedom. My muted palette and saturated colors are heavily influenced by the Chinese paintings.
My first panoramics focused on what was happening in the United States. Later, I added basketball backboards and put them on trees. African Americans where I grew up didn’t go into nature much. We did because my mom insisted on it. My courts are socio-political paintings of a concrete, urban landscape that turns into an enchanted space.
“It’s about how materials speak with each other . . . Jazz is the best analogy; a trio has three instruments, maybe ten songs, but play each differently. They’re creating a new syntax. With my painting, I don’t know what the new syntax is, I just know it’s not going to be the old one.”
From the Court to Another World
I started thinking about the basketball court as a portal to another place. It’s not about playing the game; it’s a leaping-off point with the backboard as your step into nature. The viewer is beckoned by this one-point perspective that leads into the central space of the painting. The three small landscape paintings appear against a background that is a section of one of the paintings.
Materials in Conversation
I did these paintings over five, six months. My paintings are never sketched out. I knew I wanted the tension of the concrete surface and the counter of the leafy tree — the organic and the inorganic — but I didn’t know how it was going to play out. It’s about how materials speak with each other. I did the trees and background by hand, not stencil. I started with one tree, and that informed the next. There is a relational development that happens; each tree has a different quality or identity. Textures and elements close to each other create a language that communicates something and instigates another move. Jazz is the best analogy; a trio has three instruments, maybe ten songs, but play each differently. They’re creating a new syntax. With my painting, I don’t know what the new syntax is, I just know it’s not going to be the old one. I set up the pieces and allow the improvisation to happen.
[Italian artist] Giorgio Morandi did these still lifes, very muted, soft oil paintings. He used a bottle, a cylinder, and general shapes, and would move them around and change the light. Similarly, I move elements around to create new sensations in the landscape. Some things have more texture, others none. No one light source illuminates them all. I want it otherworldly.
Abstraction as a Guide
I’m always thinking about abstract painting’s history and trying to insert my own concept of the social element — what wasn’t there in the past and what it could be now. A lot of abstraction is about emptying the space to a very contemplative moment. I had never seen an element like a hoop net pattern or a basketball image that turned into a textural- or color-filled space.
I generally know which ingredients I’m going to use, I just don’t know how, the amounts, and where they’re going to be located.
The Push and Pull of Collage
I use a lot of collage in my abstract work. I’ll start by choosing a fabric from my collection and think about my palette from that point, Or I might put down a color and then a fabric that somehow counters it. A lot of the trees in the paintings are based on the disruption of collage — collage stands out a bit, with different ranges in density. One tree looks like it weighs a lot, another is ethereal and feathery. I play off light and shadow, juxtaposing the feeling of push and pull. I don’t generally think of push and pull with representational work, but that’s what I was trying to do with these trees.
The Surprise of the Small
I was intending on putting the biggest paintings I can get on this forty-two-foot wall, because who would think about small paintings on a wall that big? But the surprise was that the small paintings made the most sense. And I want the viewer to have the micro-macro thing, where you’re scaled one-to-one with the background, but then you have these intimate moments with the smaller landscapes. You go back for landscape and you get up close for landscape. That was an accident, but a happy accident.
How Art Has Changed My Relationship to Basketball
When I first was making paintings with basketballs, a little basketball just covered the whole canvas, almost like a pointillist painting. My intention was to take an unlikely element and have it morph into an abstract event, not a sports event. But it was hard to dissolve that element into this representational painting, so it’s not about basketball, but instigated by basketball.
My wife and daughter will not allow me to watch sports at home, so I have this distant connection to the real game when it comes to the professional part. As a painter I’ve allowed the game to dissolve into the qualities of abstraction that I’ve been after — like using the basketball hoop netting. It’s just a wild pattern. And it might not be the whole painting, it’s just a section of it or something. The best way to describe it is that it’s pop culture. No different really than Andy Warhol grabbing the soup cans and the Brillo pads, and saying, “This is art.” Rather, I have just integrated it into my painting procedure.
Studio Rituals
I meditate before I start working. I try not to go in the studio with baggage. Meditating makes that easy. I play music occasionally, but when beginning a piece, I need silence to figure out my navigation. There’s a certain space that silence and meditation allow. The artist Philip Guston said that when he went into the studio, he had to kick everybody out: the critics, the collectors, the students, all these people on his mind. The last person he kicked out was himself. That’s what I have to do. I’m the last person in my way.
Awe, Wonder, and the Universe
I lean toward the political; that’s what I was used to growing up going to Black Panther rallies. It was tumultuous and scary as a kid to see this stuff, but that’s the way it went. Art should carry an element of social relevance. I hope these paintings convey my sense of being an African American youth playing on these courts, but there’s this beautiful landscape we’re separated from, and we need to break that barrier, because there’s a glorious other thing happening behind the scene. I want people to get a sense of awe and wonder of nature and get a little bit of the universe in each one of those paintings. That’s my hope.
Even if the work gets a little wild and chaotic, it is the eye of the storm, that inner quiet place, and not the storm.
Bay Area Walls: David Huffman is on view through August 2025 on Floor 5. Learn more about SFMOMA’s Bay Area Walls commissions. Bay Area Walls: David Huffman is presented with Get in the Game: Sports, Art, Culture.