Patrick Martinez Celebrates the Youth in New Basketball Mural
Commissioned by the ICA SF in the city’s Dogpatch neighborhood.
In anticipation of his upcoming solo exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco (ICA SF), Patrick Martinez has created a new mural for a basketball court in the city’s Dogpatch neighborhood. The project was part of a restoration effort for the Alive & Free Good Tidings basketball court and commissioned by the ICA SF in collaboration with Bay Area Mural Project and the Warriors Community Foundation.
The Los Angeles-based visual artist drew from his Pee-Chee painting series, which nods to the illustrations school kids draw in classic rule-bound notebooks, to create towering young adults — some dressed in graduation attire, while others are outstretched to score the winning basket.
“I typically paint portraits of kids who have been murdered by police,” Martinez said in a past interview. “I was thinking about the flip side of that, how many kids have benefited from Alive & Free and gone to college because of this program. As I looked at images of people who had been through the program, then it started clicking.”
Discrimination and police violence have been several of many prevalent topics within Martinez’s work, who sought to create a mural that both probed into these issues, while celebrating communities of color. His upcoming solo show, eponymously named after the artist, will go on view at ICA SF from September 23 to January 7, 2024.
Elsewhere, a tourist vandalized a wall of the Roman Colosseum.
