Muhammed Ali is crouching with his bare fists up, looking like he’s ready to explode. Andy Warhol, the Pop Art specialist, is wearing boxing shorts and heavy gloves and clowning around with his art buddy Jean-Michel Basquiat. There’s Mike Tyson and Joe Louis, two heavyweight stars, and some newly made photographs of young women boxers in Cuba.
The main exhibition galleries here at the Norton Museum of Art are overflowing with the stuff of prizefighting: paintings; photographs; sculptures of fighters; punching bags; puffy, fancy-sewed and bejeweled boxing gloves; a shriveled leather speed bag; and a stained heavy punching bag dangling from a weathered wooden ladder.
Titled “Strike Fast, Dance Lightly: Artists on Boxing,” the show runs through March 9. The Norton Museum, with collections of 18th, 19th and early 20th-century American art and European Impressionists, is some 70 miles — about an hour and a half drive — from the headquarters of Art Basel on Miami Beach, or a slightly shorter ride on a Brightline train from downtown Miami.
Featuring 120 separate pieces, the exhibition rambles through five galleries in a range of media and eras. Some of the art was made in the later part of the 19th century. Some as recently as last year. In conversations at the museum and later by phone, Arden Sherman, the Norton’s senior curator of contemporary art and the curator of the show, said she used images of boxers and the tools of boxing to ignite thoughts and feelings across a range of human experiences.
“The show is not really about boxing, it’s about life, the daily struggle, health, money, survival,” Sherman said.
“Life is like a never-ending cycle of thrown punches and dodged blows. You’re constantly taking actions and not understanding what you’re doing. Round after round after round. At the end, before you fall down, you realize that your opponent is yourself. The most critical person is actually you. That’s the story of the show.”
The exhibition displays works by artists from across the United States and around the world, Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America.
Sherman said she also sees the show as a metaphor for the United States presidential election. “It’s been a contact sport,” she said. “Harris and Trump. We’re seeing a lot of combative rhetoric, you know, hostile language. We’re used to seeing the red side and the blue side. Fighting and duking it out has become a normal part of our existence. The exhibition works in alignment with the election.”
On a recent fall day, many people making their way through the galleries — past a glistening Mike Tyson in charcoal on paper and a row of young, barefoot boys from Ghana with their dukes up at a boxing school — noted that they had expected violence might be on the agenda. But they seemed almost relieved that it was not a main element of the exhibition.
“I see strength,” said Nancy Marshall, who worked in management at an Eddie Bauer outlet in Syracuse, N.Y., before moving with her husband, Anthony, a retired tax lawyer, to nearby Delray Beach. They had come to see the show together.
“I don’t see the violence,” she said. “I see the beauty, the color, the form.”
Sherman said she started thinking about the boxing exhibition about four years ago when she was the director and curator of the Hunter East Harlem Gallery of Hunter College in Manhattan. “I kept seeing artists doing pieces on boxing,” she said.
She pitched the idea to Ghislain d’Humières, the director and chief executive of the Norton. He hired her about two years ago after the conversation and she started planning the show. Not long after, she discovered two New York art centers were also working on boxing shows. She and the New York curators decided to combine efforts.
The New York curators’ shows appeared in midsummer 2023, one at The Church, a nonprofit arts space in Sag Harbor, on Long Island, another at the FLAG Art Foundation in Manhattan. About a year later, Sherman opened her show at the Norton. It includes some pieces from New York in addition to those she curated herself.
Given the size and complexity of the show and to help museum guests find their way, Sherman has posted small signs with the 11 themes; among them, Race and Culture, Women in Boxing, Tools, Fantasy and Movement.
There are works by famous painters like George Bellows and Edward Hopper, a flashy screen print by Roy Lichtenstein of a bare fist zooming upward, past the head of what might be a young businessman, four drawings by Muhammad Ali and Warhol’s screen print of Ali, in which the bare-fisted heavyweight champion is poised to punch.
There’s a shot by the Scottish-born photographer Harry Benson, well known for images of presidents and Civil Rights leaders, of Ali poking a glove at the Beatles during their first trip to the United States, and a shadowy Diane Arbus photo of a fighter chasing a swinging heavy bag in a New York gym.
Sherwin Rio, a Filipino American artist based in Brooklyn, has made a flimsy boxing ring out of twine and bamboo sticks that’s about eight feet square. Rio stuck a pair of four-foot-tall household fans in the ring. He plugged them in, and the fans pivot side to side, as if they were boxers.
In one corner, two women are boxing in a video show played simultaneously and repeatedly on a 9:22-minute cycle. The event plays on four large screens grouped together. The women are punching and kicking, grunting and gasping for air, drawing people toward the screens. The artist is Dana Hoey.
Large, richly colored walls rise as partitions in the galleries. A single fighter from Ghana in white boxing gloves commands a glistening, deep blue wall. The artist, Amoako Boafo, has centered his fighter alone on an intense yellow canvas. The fighter is wearing white shorts with a beige waistband loaded with butterflies. Some might mistake him for Ali. That’s because the butterflies recall a favorite phrase of Ali’s: “float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.” It’s not Ali, though, and Boafo has not given his fighter a name.
On the other side of the blue wall, a young man lies knocked out on his back in a short but wide rectangular painting, that nearly spans the width of the room. The fighter is all alone, sprawled on the ring, captured in the wide beam of an overhead spotlight. The violence often associated with prizefighting is not there. His body is lying still, with no signs of blood, or even an opponent; the young man seems at peace.
One morning, d’Humières, the director of the Norton, walked up to Caleb Hahne Quintana’s big painting of the knocked-out fighter. It reminded him, he said in an interview, of Édouard Manet’s “The Dead Toreador,” likely painted around 1864.
“You feel pity,” d’Humières said. “You feel sadness. In one case he died. In one case he is knocked out. The work makes you think. It makes you see possibilities. That’s what the whole show is about.”
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