The New Home of the L.A. Clippers Is a Hot Ticket for Art
When the $2 billion home of the Los Angeles Clippers, Intuit Dome, opens next month with a concert by Bruno Mars, visitors to the 18,000-seat arena will not only be greeted by an enormous double-sided LED scoreboard, an outdoor community basketball court and food choices ranging from vegan cauliflower wraps to dulce de leche churros.
They will also encounter about $11 million worth of ambitious, immense and site-specific artworks that have been commissioned from seven artists with Los Angeles connections.
Sculpture, murals and digital art installations by artists including Refik Anadol, Jennifer Steinkamp, Charles Gaines and Glenn Kaino will be on view throughout the campus of the privately funded new home of the N.B.A.’s Clippers.
The artists involved said they liked the idea of reaching people outside a conventional context. “l believe art should be for anyone and anywhere,” said Anadol, whose A.I.-driven digital artwork, “Living Arena,” is displayed on an LED screen 40 feet tall by 70 feet wide. “Museums and galleries are so last century. I don’t think there are any more borders.”
The entire surface of the Intuit Dome serves as the backdrop for Jennifer Steinkamp’s digital artwork “Swoosh.”Credit…Alex Welsh for The New York Times
The Intuit Dome is the latest sports arena or stadium to embrace art with its hot dogs and beer, a move intended in part to make the spaces more appealing as rental venues when the resident teams aren’t playing. SoFi Stadium, also in Inglewood, which is home to the N.F.L.’s Los Angeles Rams and Los Angeles Chargers, last year presented a pair of exhibitions focused on African-American art and history. Other stadiums that prominently feature art include AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas, where the Dallas Cowboys and Anish Kapoor’s “Sky Mirror” reside, and Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta, home to the Atlanta Falcons and a more than 73,000-pound avian sculpture by Gabor Miklos Szoke called “Rise Up.”