Strike Fast, Dance Lightly: largest ever boxing exhibition links sport and art | Art

Boxer’s canvas, meet artist’s canvas. Sweet science, meet fine arts.

That’s what happens when an art museum – namely the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach – hosts an exhibition about boxing. Titled Strike Fast, Dance Lightly: Artists on Boxing, it’s billed as the largest, most in-depth exhibition on artistic representations of boxing and the sport’s wider impact on global culture.

“I think you don’t necessarily need to be professionalized to understand boxing,” the curator, Arden Sherman, said during a stroll through the galleries. “It’s a combat sport, two people interacting with each other.”

The card includes heavy hitters from the art world – Warhol, Basquiat, Arbus, Hopper, Haring, Ruscha, Lichtenstein, Ali. Ali? Yes, Muhammad Ali is represented as both a subject and a contributor. In addition to multiple images of “The Greatest” – there he is punching George Harrison! There he is in a Warhol print! – the show displays multiple drawings of Ali’s, two from 1967 and two from 2011; in the latter year, he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.

In one drawing, “the cycle, the neverending cycle, the loop of the fight is in his mind,” Sherman said. In another, the perspective shifts to “outside the ring, it could be in the front row”.

The show comprises 120 objects, all on loan from museums and private collections, spanning almost a century and a half. These include two early 20th-century paintings by George Bellows, who became synonymous with depictions of boxing. Each room evokes the sweaty interior of a boxing gym. Yes, the punching bags in the corner of the first section are real – they’re part of Glenn Ligon’s ink-on-vinyl Skin Tight (Thug Life) contributions. It doesn’t sound like anyone has tried punching them – at least, not yet.

Running through March, the exhibit fits well – like a boxing glove, you might say – within the recently expanded museum, which is also hosting another temporary exhibit on the Spanish painter Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida as well as the permanent collection. The museum is a short drive from Mar-a-Lago, home of Donald Trump, who has been a ringside mainstay at boxing matches and MMA fights.

You can float like a butterfly through the 11 sections of this exhibit. It grabs you in its clutch from the get-go, with artistically embellished boxing gear. MyLoan Dinh’s Tough Love is a speed bag decorated with yellow and pink Valentine’s Day-style handmade clay hearts bearing alternating messages, “TOUGH” and “LOVE”. Meanwhile, Demetri Broxton adorns two gloves with cowrie shells and the collective question “How You Gon Win When You Ain’t Right Within?”

“This show is something I’ve been thinking about for years and years,” Sherman said. “When I was interviewing for this job at the Norton, I pitched this show when they asked ‘what would you do if you had this job?’”

After she got the job, she began planning the exhibit – and learned that great minds think alike. Two venues in the New York area, the Flag Art Foundation and the Church Sag Harbor, were also planning boxing exhibits. Sherman contacted them with a proposal.

“I said, ‘why don’t we celebrate a completely new exhibit model?’” she recalled. “Three unique shows, not a traveling show, with one shared title and theme.”

The New York venues had their shows last year, with the Norton’s larger exhibit debuting this October. Sherman estimates that about 65 to 70% of works in the Norton show are original to the exhibit, with about 30% previously exhibited in New York.

Many pieces in the Norton show display the excitement of the fight – including Neil Leifer’s remarkable bird’s-eye-view photo of Ali’s 1966 triumph over Cleveland Williams for the world heavyweight title. Williams sprawls in the upper right-hand corner, arms at 90-degree angles, as if doing cactus pose in yoga. The ref counts him out. In the opposite corner, at lower left, Ali raises his arms, also at right angles. To capture the image, Leifer placed a camera in the Astrodome rafters hours before the fight, never imagining how iconic the resulting image would become.

Recent events give some objects a different tinge. Was it serendipity that Sherman situated Champ, Shaun Leonardo’s charcoal-on-paper representation of Mike Tyson, among the opening images? Just a few weeks ago, the former heavyweight champion lost a heavily publicized but ill-advised fight to the YouTube alumnus Jake Paul.

Later in the exhibit, an unexpected take on Tyson emerges: Michel Comte’s photo of the fighter with a dove.

“I love to think about this tender moment,” Sherman said. “A hard guy who’s so tough, who bit Evander Holyfield’s ear off. Here he is, posing with a soft, gentle symbol of peace.”

Nearby is another unconventional take on a well-known boxer: the Nigerian photographer Samuel Fosso has recreated Ali’s self-depiction as an arrow-pierced St Sebastian. Ali did this for the cover of Esquire in 1968, after organized boxing shunned him for refusing to be drafted into the US military during the Vietnam War.

Befitting an aesthetic survey of boxing, the exhibit gives space to less explored aspects of the centuries-old pugilistic pastime. Artists give their takes on older boxers, defeated boxers, female boxers and LGBTQ+ boxers.

The boxer turned artist Caleb Hahne Quintana’s How a Fall Can Make You Real is a full-body, oil-and-acrylic image of a prone fighter, evoking an earlier image of another violent, dangerous sport – bullfighting, in Manet’s The Dead Toreador. Quintana knows something about the risks inherent in boxing: his career was cut short due to concussions and injuries.

“More than he liked to win, he hated to lose,” Sherman said. “No one wanted to paint a loser. He gave this as much weight as a winner.”

A fellow artist with a boxing resume, Cheryl Pope, is represented in a video of herself head-butting speed bags filled with water hanging from a ceiling.

“She was a Chicago artist who claims Miami as her home,” Sherman said. “She was a Gold Gloves boxer. So is her grandfather … Athleticism, endurance, physicality are common threads in all of her work.”

Rose Marie Cromwell’s photos document women’s boxing in Cuba, where it was legalized in 2022, in time for this year’s summer Olympics. Ring girls get recognition through photos taken by Deborah Willis from a 2013 fight in Queens.

The internationality of the sport is also on display, with contributors and/or works representing Africa, Latin America and Asia as well as the US. This includes a boxing ring by the Filipino-American artist Sherwin Rio using materials from the Philippines – bamboo and twine.

“It’s very much in line with … island culture, being resourceful, locked in by water,” Sherman said.

The show acknowledges the historical narrative of boxing in the US. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, combatants often fought bare-knuckle, making the sport so violent that authorities outlawed it. Matches took place illegally in clubs, populated by fixers – and by the American artist Bellows, who became renowned for his paintings of boxing, two of which are on display: a 1907 depiction of Club Night in New York City, and a 1923 representation of boxing’s first heavyweight champion, John L Sullivan.

Sherman noted that Bellows’ portrayal of Sullivan was done “years and years and years” after he won the championship in 1899, and by then he was “being trotted out before one of the fights”, like a “show pony”.

An even earlier representation of boxing in the exhibit comes from the photography pioneer Eadweard Muybridge and his late 19th-century sequential images of a fight – bare-knuckle, of course. For historical aficionados, there are also Scott Covert’s gravestone rubbings of Jack Dempsey and Sugar Ray Robinson, and in the largest work in the show, Gary Simmons’s tribute to Sam Langford, a Black boxer nicknamed “the Boston Tar Baby” and shunned by white promoters because of his dark skin.

“Why do so many artists take up boxing?” Sherman asked reflectively. “It’s extremely universal, not bound by geography, economics, culture. In theory, everyone on Earth – at least a certain age – has an understanding of what boxing is … You couldn’t really say that about any other sport.”