Brooklyn Sports & Entertainment Announces Brooklyn Art Encounters, a Multi-Year Initiative Bringing World-Class Contemporary Art to the Brooklyn Community

Sarah Sze to transform Barclays Center atrium with monumental suspended sculpture
 

Paul Pfeiffer will serve as Barclays Center's inaugural artist-in-residence
 

Brooklyn-born artist Kambui Olujimi will present a major public sculpture on Ticketmaster Plaza in 2027
 

Additional works by artists Mark Bradford, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Rashid Johnson, and others
 

BROOKLYN, NY — Brooklyn Sports & Entertainment, parent company of the Brooklyn Nets, the 2024 WNBA Champion New York Liberty, and Barclays Center, today announced Brooklyn Art Encounters, a comprehensive, multi-year art program that will bring major new commissions by leading contemporary artists to the arena's public spaces, interior architecture, digital environments, and surrounding communities.

The program, led by Brooklyn Sports & Entertainment Vice Chair Clara Wu Tsai, encompasses large-scale public art, permanent works integrated into the arena's architecture, a new digital art series, and a community-based media workshop. Among the first projects:

“The artists in this program aren't simply participants, they have helped us consider and ultimately realize how we create space for art in public life,” said Clara Wu Tsai. “Brooklyn has one of the greatest concentrations of creative talent anywhere in the world, and Barclays Center is one of its busiest transit points. This program places art in dialogue with the architecture and daily rhythm of the plaza, redefining what a sports arena can be for fans, players, and the public. In working closely with artists to develop these projects, we hope to spark imagination, creativity, and a sense of wonder in a space where millions of people gather."

Brooklyn Art Encounters has worked with an esteemed team of advisors to select specific projects and guide the program going forward, including Thelma Golden (Director and Chief Curator, The Studio Museum in Harlem), Michael Govan (CEO and Wallis Annenberg Director, LACMA), Clara Kim (Chief Curator, LA MoCA), Hans Ulrich Obrist (Artistic Director, Serpentine), Anne Pasternak (Director, Brooklyn Museum), and Akili Tommasino (Modern and Contemporary Art Curator, The Metropolitan Museum of Art). Andria Hickey, former Chief Curator at The Shed, is serving as curatorial advisor and overseeing the program.

Paul Pfeiffer, Barclays Center Artist-in-Residence

Paul Pfeiffer will serve as Barclays Center’s first artist-in-residence, a new program designed to embed an artist within the ecosystem of the arena. Known for examining spectacle, broadcast imagery, and the choreography of crowds, Pfeiffer approaches the arena as both a subject and a site for inquiry. Conceived as a cultural laboratory, the residency provides access to the arena’s public and behind-the-scenes spaces, games, and live events, creating an opportunity to observe the systems, rituals, and communities that animate the building.

Pfeiffer is an internationally recognized artist whose work spans video, photography, and sculpture, examining mass media, spectatorship, and the collective rituals of sports, religion, and popular culture. He has presented solo exhibitions at institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, Hamburger Bahnhof, MUSAC León, and the National Gallery of Victoria. A major retrospective of his work opened at MOCA Los Angeles in 2023 and traveled to the Guggenheim Bilbao and MCA Chicago. His work is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim, Tate Modern, M+, and the Pinault Collection. Pfeiffer is a co-founder, along with Julie Mehretu and Lawrence Chua, of Denniston Hill, an artist-founded residency in the Catskills, which is participating in the 2026 Venice Biennale.

LaToya Ruby Frazier: The Liberty Portraits

The first work as a part of Brooklyn Art Encounters was The Liberty Portraits: A Monument to the 2024 Champions, a public installation by LaToya Ruby Frazier installed in July 2025 honoring the 2024 WNBA champion New York Liberty team. Frazier's first outdoor installation, the images reflect the power of women’s leadership, diversity, family, and an unyielding love for basketball. Though the Liberty roster has since evolved, this piece focuses on a selection of players that were integral to the Liberty’s championship run, and thus, critical figures in a historic moment in New York sports. A selection of these Liberty players from their title season is depicted across a series of larger-than-life adjacent portraits: the first of a player in uniform, and the second among chosen family. For the latter, Frazier visited each player in locations meaningful to them. This part of the project brought Frazier to the Bahamas, Texas, Arkansas, Alabama, as well as locations in New York City and Brooklyn, showcasing the dimension and character that shape a basketball roster. Known for personal storytelling in her work, each of Frazier’s portraits are also accompanied by a first-person testimonial from a loved one, hand-selected by the players.

First installed on the Ticketmaster Plaza in 2025, the work is currently on display on the walls of the arena's suite level and is available for general public viewing during arena tours.

Art on the Hour in Partnership with Barclays Bank​​​​​​

Launching May 2026, Art on the Hour is a new series, in partnership with Barclays Bank, presenting 60-second works by internationally recognized artists on the Barclays Center Oculus screen at the top of every hour. By transforming one of the most visible public displays in Brooklyn into a rotating exhibition of time-based contemporary art, the program offers artists working in video and animation an opportunity to reach broad, diverse audiences beyond traditional museum and gallery settings, embedding contemporary art into the daily rhythm of the city. Art on the Hour will run through Spring 2027, and the artists for the first and second seasons will be announced later this year.

Exodus: A Media Workshop with Paul Pfeiffer and Shaun Leonardo

Also launching May 2026, Exodus: A Media Workshop is a year-long, socially engaged project developed in tandem with Pfeiffer’s residency and supported by the Social Justice Fund. Co-led with artist Shaun Leonardo and a team of artist-filmmaker mentors in collaboration with Brooklyn arts organizations, the initiative will engage youth and adults from surrounding communities, particularly system-impacted and justice-impacted individuals, in an immersive exploration of the arena’s inner workings.

Peers and friends, Leonardo and Pfeiffer share a long-standing interest in the ways sport functions as both performance and spectacle, a space where identity, competition, and collective emotion unfold before large audiences. While Pfeiffer’s work examines how media technologies shape the experience of spectatorship, Leonardo’s participatory practice engages the physical and social dynamics of sport and embodiment directly with communities.

Through hands-on training in video production, storytelling, and media practices, participants will gain behind-the-scenes access to the infrastructure that sustains live events, from broadcast operations to security and concessions. As one of Brooklyn’s largest live event venues, the arena provides a unique environment to explore how large-scale cultural productions are organized and produced. The program emphasizes skill building, workforce development, and career exposure, offering participants insight into potential professional pathways within the media and live events industries. The workshop will culminate in participant-created media works reflecting their experiences inside the arena. Exodus will run through Fall 2027.

Shaun Leonardo is a Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary artist whose participatory practice explores the intersections of sport, masculinity, race, and justice. His work has been presented at the Guggenheim Museum, the High Line, New Museum, and MASS MoCA. He is currently Executive Director of Socrates Sculpture Park and previously served as co-director of Recess, where he founded Assembly, a groundbreaking diversion program for court-involved youth.

Sarah Sze: Wave

Opening in Fall 2026, Sarah Sze will create Wave, a monumental suspended sculpture for the Barclays Center entry atrium. Stretching across the ceiling, the installation unfolds as a sweeping arc composed of more than 250 sculptural screens animated by shifting projected imagery. Images travel across the surface in fragments—appearing, dissolving, and recombining—so that the work continually gathers and releases visual information. As viewers move through the space, these shifting sequences register differently from each vantage point, producing a sensation of cresting movement that is never fixed but constantly in flux. Serving as both a dynamic focal point and an experiential threshold, Wave transforms the atrium into a dynamic field of light, motion, and perception, amplifying the collective energy of arrival and gathering while acting as both a visual landmark and an immersive threshold into the arena.

Sze is a MacArthur Fellow whose work spans sculpture, installation, painting, drawing, video, and architecture-scale environments. She represented the United States at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013 and has solo presentations at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Storm King Art Center, Fondation Cartier, Haus der Kunst, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Her permanent public commissions include projects for the High Line, the MTA's Second Avenue Subway, LaGuardia Airport, and MIT. Her work is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art NYC, the Whitney Museum of American Art NYC, Tate Modern London, and the Fondation Louis Vuitton Paris.

Flatbush Premium Entrance: Mark Bradford and Rashid Johnson

The new Flatbush Premium entrance at Barclays Center, opening Fall 2026, will feature large scale paintings by two of the most significant figures in contemporary American art.

A painting by Mark Bradford, known for his layered abstractions exploring race, class, and urban geography, will be featured in the entrance. Titled Tina (2006), the large-scale work is composed of singed end papers and silver foil meticulously layered to form an expanding circular composition. Drawing on Bradford’s early experiences working in his mother’s hair salon, the painting incorporates these everyday materials to construct a richly textured surface that evokes the social histories embedded in urban life. Among many accolades, Bradford represented the United States at the 2017 Venice Biennale and is the recipient of numerous honors, including a MacArthur Fellowship and the U.S. Department of State’s Medal of Arts, and has been the subject of major exhibitions at museums worldwide.

Rashid Johnson's Untitled Anxious Audience (2019) – which was featured in his recent retrospective A Poem for Deep Thinkers at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum – will anchor the Amex Entrance at Flatbush. This monumental painting features a grid of abstract, expressive faces rendered in black soap and wax on white ceramic tiles, with graffiti-like energy. Johnson has become a defining voice of his generation, working across sculpture, painting, film, and installation to explore themes of cultural identity, collective anxiety, and personal narrative. His work has been the subject of major solo exhibitions at institutions including the Aspen Art Museum, the Moderna Museet in Sweden, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas, and the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City.

Kambui Olujimi: We Always Have Room For One More

Opening in May 2027, Kambui Olujimi will reveal a large-scale public sculpture featuring seven bronze figures gathered in a game of Skelly, the classic Brooklyn street game. Supported by the Social Justice Fund, this new commission will be installed on the Ticketmaster Plaza at the intersection of Flatbush and Atlantic Avenues in Spring 2027 and will draw on Olujimi's memories of growing up in Bedford-Stuyvesant and the plaza's long history as a neighborhood gathering place. Titled We Always Have Room for One More, the larger-than-life figures will form a surreal assembly of characters inspired by the artist's past works, historic Brooklyn figures, and local community icons.

Kambui Olujimi is an interdisciplinary artist. His works have premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, Museum of Modern Art, Sharjah Biennial 15, the 14th Dak’art Biennale, and Kunstmuseum Basel, among others. Olujimi’s work is in the permanent collections of numerous museums, including The Whitney Museum of American Art, Brooklyn Museum, The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Cleveland Museum of Art, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA. This spring, Olujimi will unveil his permanent commission at JFK International Airport Terminal 6 and has been invited to the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia entitled In Minor Keys by Koyo Kouoh.

The artworks included in Brooklyn Art Encounters join existing works in and around Barclays Center, including a series of Black Dada paintings (2024) by Adam Pendleton and Tavares Strachan's You Belong Here/We Belong Here (2021), as well as Ursula von Rydingsvard’s Ona (2013), José Parlá’s Diary of Brooklyn (2012), Mickalene Thomas’ Untitled (2012), which were commissioned at the opening of the building.

For more information about Brooklyn Art Encounters, visit barclayscenter.com/art.