Ep 13: Sport & Queer Spirits

A queer artist in Boston crochets basketball nets and paints whole courts like quilts you can only see from above. They're also a Shaker scholar. This episode asks whether sports, Shakers, and the innovative use of colour and craft might all be connected, and whether these things are more political than they look from the outside.

Maria Molteni (Mol-TENNY) grew up in Nashville, Tennessee, played about ten years of basketball, and came to Boston for art school. After graduating, painting in a moldy basement, they picked up a basketball again. The hoop in their neighbourhood didn't have a net. Maria knew how to crochet. So they made one. That's the whole origin story of an entire body of public art.

"It's kind of a cycle that you can insert yourself into in a way that's both an intervention, but also like plugging into the seasons, into this natural cycle."

Maria Molteni

The Nets and the NCAA

From that first net, Maria started a collective: NCAA, the New Craft Artists in Action. The acronym is deliberate. The other NCAA, the National Collegiate Athletic Association, was founded in 1906 to discipline young bodies into amateur competition. Maria's NCAA does the opposite. It teaches people to make a thing for their own neighbourhood and give it away. They published a knit-and-crochet pattern book, sold by donation and free to anyone who can't pay. The collective has had collaborators around the world, including queer sports collectives in Croatia and the Philippines.

The Cosmic Courts

Once the nets took off, Maria went bigger. Through the Boston Artists-in-Residence program, they got eight months to work with kids in Dorchester, Massachusetts, on a court at Harambee Park. They put chalkboards on the fences and invited everybody who used the space to draw what they wanted to see in the paint. That first Cosmic Court won a National Public Art Award from Americans for the Arts. Maria has done seven of them now, all across Massachusetts. From above, in the drone shots, they look like Shaker gift drawings. They look like Gee's Bend coverlets.

Maria's two principles for the work: participation over spectatorship, and the liberation of recreation. If the reason we push athletics is health and wellness, what happens to the actual health and wellness? The kids who get most excluded from athletic spaces, the queer kids, the fat kids, the girls who don't fit the team, are the kids the chalk-and-paint court actually serves.

The Shakers

Maria is a Shaker scholar, and the connections run deep. Mother Ann Lee was born in Manchester, England, in 1736, sailed from Liverpool in 1774 with about nine followers, and built a movement that preached equality between women and men, equality between races, and a celibate communal life. She was beaten and jailed for it. She died in 1784 at forty-eight. At its peak the community had about six thousand members. Today there are two living Shakers at Sabbathday Lake in Maine.

Maria's family farm in Tennessee sat thirty minutes from South Union Shaker Village in Kentucky. Their grandparents were competitive square dancers. The Shakers did formal shape dancing that wasn't far from square dancing. We don't know if Maria's people ever visited a Shaker meeting, but the villages welcomed visitors. That's how they recruited.

Maria calls what the Shakers did "practical and visionary." They made the cleanest furniture in American craft history, wrote some of the best American religious music, and invented tools that ended up in regular kitchens and workshops, all of it imbued with spirit. Maria's courts do the same thing two centuries later: folk and pop at the same time.

"I do believe that anyone can be an artist. I often go back to childhood because I just think that's when we are our least inhibited, most imaginative. What did we want to see in the world before we were told that we were wrong?"

Maria Molteni

Keith Haring and the Lineage

Keith Haring drew in the subway with white chalk on black paper that covered unsold ad spaces. He didn't sell the work. He gave it away. Between 1982 and 1989 he painted more than fifty public murals. He opened the Pop Shop in SoHo to sell work on cheap T-shirts because he wanted regular people to afford it. He was openly gay when that was politically dangerous. He died of AIDS-related complications in February 1990 at thirty-one. Maria's working in his tradition: painting in public, queer in public, giving the work away, refusing to make the result precious.

Throughline Voices

AJ Young, a fibre artist in Michigan working on quilts about queer legal history, describes quilts as a kind of friction: the moment something familiar becomes something else, and once you see it you can't unsee it. Zak Foster, a quilter on the Cumberland Plateau in Tennessee, asks how we create nostalgia for something that doesn't exist yet, how we make a future worth falling in love with. Both voices connect directly to what Maria is building on a basketball court in Dorchester.