WAM Crosses Cultures: Baseball and Art

Thursday, 15 June 2006 10:45

Wichita, KS - America’s pastime meets America’s art in the exhibition John Hull: Paintings of the Wichita Wranglers.  Beginning Father’s Day, June 18 until October 8, more than 20 large-scale paintings will be on view featuring scenes from Lawrence Dumont Stadium – home to the city’s minor league baseball team, the Wichita Wranglers.

“By focusing on our own Wichita Wranglers, artist John Hull helps us think about the familiar but often overlooked theme of sports narrative as a serious subject of art.  His work provides Wichitans an intimacy with sport-inspired art rarely experienced in an art Museum,” states Charles K. Steiner, Museum Director.

Mr. Hull’s works focus more on the relationship of the fans to the game rather than the players themselves.  Of the twenty paintings only six show games being played and two of those paintings are about the fans – the ballgame itself is seen at a distance, an afterthought compared to the relationships among the people in the stands. 

Eric Edelstein, General Manager of the Wichita Wranglers, observes that the only part of baseball many people see is what is captured on sports highlights, condensing hours of a game, months of practice and years of growth into one short, little clip.  But, Mr. Edelstein expresses, “John Hull does not see the game through the same eyes as those that crave the highlight reel.  John sees the game as it is, and understands that the game itself is only one small element in the game of baseball.  That the game is about the people who play, teach and watch the game.”

Many of the paintings in this series are based on the panoramic format.  It is a compositional strategy used by a number of landscape artists including the American nineteenth-century painters Martin Johnson Heade, Sanford Gifford, Worthington Whittredge, John Kensett, and Eastman Johnson as well as the contemporary painter Rackstraw Downes.  Mr. Hull had only occasionally worked with panoramas prior to this.  A friend of his, Joan Troccoli, said she liked the new baseball pictures because “in baseball so much is going on all over the place and only occasionally does everyone focus on just one thing, kind of like life itself.” 

Visit the Wichita Art Museum at : http://www.wichitaartmuseum.org/