Bringing a maternal aspect into the sports arena

I’ve found a couple of women (who are mothers) in Lawrence to include in the show. Marianne, a visual artist working with paper and performance has written a very interesting piece about her son’s recent experience of falling in love with the KU basketball team. Marianne writes about the ways his passion for sports has involved and bonded the rest of the family. She argues it might be better for him to be an athlete than an artist in this society because support for athletics is all around him.  Paul Sprawl who has been a full time artist for a decade will write a rebuttal. Having weighed the pros and cons of being an artist in America, he believes that swimming against the current in this society is an ethical position everybody should consider.

I filmed Annie at the new multi-million dollar Free State High sports complex wearing a red dress on the soccer field. Though she’s a talented soccer player, her relationship to the soccer ball is pretty maternal in the footage. She also enters a batting cage near the field where she free birds who are stuck in the mesh. She frees a baseball in a similar matter (like a mom releasing her offspring).

The incarceration of birds in the man made batting cage reminds me of how human agendas often impact other species. At such e ridiculously funded facility I see sports and art as two different species. At Free State High the sports program runs rough shot over the arts programming.

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