In the Paint: Ernie Barnes and the Art of the Game is presented as a companion exhibition to Get in the Game: Sports, Art, Culture at Pérez.
In the Paint: Ernie Barnes and the Art of the Game is presented as a companion exhibition to Get in the Game: Sports, Art, Culture at Pérez Art Museum Miami. While that exhibition situates sport within a broad global and cultural framework, this presentation offers a focused exploration of Black athletic movement, performance, rhythm, and visibility through works drawn from The Norwood Collection.
At the center of the exhibition is the work of Ernie Barnes, the celebrated artist and former professional football player whose paintings transformed the athletic body into a powerful visual language of motion, improvisation, tension, and grace. Barnes’s figures do not merely depict movement—they embody it. Elongated and rhythmic, his compositions capture the sensation of exertion, anticipation, collision, and release from the inside out.
Barnes’s work can be understood through the language of straight ahead jazz—structured yet improvisational, disciplined yet expressive. Like jazz musicians working within a composition while discovering freedom inside it, Barnes’s figures move across the picture plane with syncopation and elasticity. Repetition and variation coexist. Bodies stretch, lean, collide, and resolve like visual phrases carried by rhythm and momentum. In this way, the athlete becomes not only a competitor, but also a performer improvising within the structure of the game.
The exhibition opens with a section devoted to Paul Robeson, establishing performance itself as a foundational framework for understanding athletics, embodiment, and public visibility. Through archival theatre programmes, concert ephemera, and commemorative material—including Othello, Show Boat, and the Salute to Paul Robeson cultural celebration—the exhibition presents Robeson as athlete, actor, singer, and global cultural figure.
