NEW YORK – In a 1,200-square-foot loft studio space on the border of Bushwick and Ridgewood, directly across the street from a scrapyard and with eight-foot windows that face One World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan, there are hundreds of basketballs. There are some loose tarps. There is a rusted car door, too.
They were retrieved from various parts of New York City by Tyrrell Winston. He may use them, at some point, to make art.
The Brooklyn-based multimedia artist is leaving the space in April because he is briefly moving to Detroit to prepare for his first-ever museum exhibition this summer at the Cranbrook Art Museum.
Winston, who just had a solo gallery opening at Library Street Collective in Detroit, is starting to gain some recognition as an artist on the rise. He has found a way to make art that connects with people around the globe even though his medium is typically trash that was just lying around, going otherwise unnoticed and forgotten. Winston, however, can’t help but see – and remember.
“Once you start looking for something,” Winston said, “you would be amazed how prevalent it becomes.”
Old basketballs – worn down by thousands of bounces, their colors faded by the sun, many of them already deflated – have long been central to Winston’s work. He sees what they were before they were left behind, but he understands why they were abandoned, too. Childhood: Running with friends until sundown, limitless energy pushing feet through the streets, to the courts, and powering the big dreams of playing this game forever.
You’re young until you’re not. That ball was everything until it wasn’t. Winston feels all this in a new way: He became a first-time father in August 2021.
This has changed his work in practical ways. He is often so sleep-deprived that he will forget what he is talking about midway through a sentence. When he is with his daughter, he also has to be more selective about what found objects he grabs for his art. Maybe he’ll have to kick a basketball into a bush to go back and get it later if he can’t handle it while he is holding her.
However, he says his recent exhibit at Library Street Collective is the tightest, cleanest, most mature art he has ever made. He dedicated the show to his daughter, Helaena, and his wife, Coco.
“Maybe it’s because when I’m thinking about my work, I am thinking about it,” Winston said, during his recent conversation with For The Win. “Since we’ve had this baby, the work that I am making is saying what I want it to say in a way that I sometimes had not previously been able to do.”
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For one of his pieces, Tyrrell Winston reproduced a parent’s literal nightmare when he crashed a roll-up basketball hoop into a Honda Civic.
When he creates scenes like that, it’s very easy to look at his art and immediately teleport back to your parent’s lawn or the backyard of your childhood home. Behind countless sheds and inside garages around the world, there are dead basketballs that represent a time that only exists in our memories. Coupled with waves of nostalgia, those memories play a major role in understanding his art.
“When the work was originally made, I was thinking about New York City,” Winston said. “But the more I started looking at the work, the more I realized that these are universal objects.”
Winston is both reusing and recontextualizing discarded objects that countless people can relate to, encouraging participation and accessibility no matter the association that it carries.
One longtime supporter of his art was the late, iconic designer and creative director Virgil Abloh.
“It’s understandable and accessible to a person off the street,” Abloh said in 2020 when discussing his art in relation to Winston’s art. “By that, I mean a real person. That’s extremely valid. We’re both pulling at signifiers that someone can easily digest. But then we take them on a journey that’s as complex as anything else.”
Winston’s art also connected with legendary artist Takashi Murakami, who acquired work and invited him to do a show at his gallery Hidari Zingaro in Tokyo.
Another person who has a particularly strong association with the work is former pro basketball player Tony Parker (not the longtime guard for the San Antonio Spurs). Parker, 28, was a McDonald’s All-American and the top-ranked recruit in the state of Georgia before he played four seasons for the UCLA Bruins.
These days, Parker is an independent art advisor with a wide client base ranging from the likes of NBA superstar Kevin Durant to mega-agent Rich Paul.
“I’m a basketball guy,” Parker said. “Tyrrell Winston put almost half of my life on a canvas. He didn’t have to do that. But he did that because it was close to him and it was original to him. In that, that made me feel comfortable in who I am and being able to do my job to the best of my abilities. That’s why I really respect his work.”
Parker said that one of his clients is fashion entrepreneur James Whitner, who is the man behind the A Ma Maniére Jordan 1 sneakers as well as the Social Status x Nike “Free Lunch” collaboration. Whitner, who has an expansive art collection, owns multiple pieces by Winston.
However, many of the collectors Parker works with are athletes who are newer to the art world and he loves introducing them to Winston because of how palatable and accessible his work feels.
“Not only is Tyrrell doing something unorthodox but he’s also lending a welcoming hand to people who don’t have the art background,” Parker continued. “They can see something that they resonate with, even if it’s just a basketball or a backboard.”
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But not everyone is enthusiastic about this artwork. Winston’s art is junk. Literal junk.
This isn’t photorealism. These aren’t pretty pictures. Strange as it sounds, though, art dealers and collectors are legitimately paying tens of thousands of dollars for deflated basketballs that Winston pulled out of trash piles or gutters. In fact, as his art kept selling, Winston actually needed more junk than he could find by himself.
The first time Winston asked for his help, Matt Roberge went to a summer camp near his parent’s house that stays closed during the winter. He figured there would be hundreds of basketballs there so he went to fill up his car.
“I like to find basketball courts that have a hill next to them that go into the woods because at the bottom of the hill there will be a ton of balls sitting in the woods,” Roberge said. “When they pop, the kids will throw them down there.”
Roberge, who sells clothes on Instagram under the handle Vintage Sponsor, is always already out looking for items to sell for his business. He tends to find basketballs at yard sales and flea markets.
As this style has become more and more ubiquitous to his work, Winston estimates that there are anywhere from 400 to 500 used basketballs in his studio at any given time. His pieces incorporating basketballs usually have them mounted and aligned in groupings as few as four or as many as 168.
It may look like he’s simply affixing them to the wall, but there’s a long process required to make each ball look the way he wants: He’ll make an incision on the back and use an epoxy resin to create a shell on the inside of the ball. After it cures, he runs rods through each ball and uses plates to keep them in place.
“It was a happy accident but I had to figure out how to solidify the balls and how to mount them,” Winston said. “It was trial and error. The first few pieces were a little terrifying.”
Winston, the son of a pastor, was born in 1985 and grew up in Southern California. He followed sports, especially the L.A. Clippers, religiously. He skated, surfed, swam, and played basketball. But his earliest dream was to be a professional basketball player, not to make art about it.
“While I’ve been a lifelong sports fan, it was never my intention to make a medium out of sports ephemera and sports materials,” shared Winston.
Although he was never short and he was always in love with the game, he was a self-described twig and he grew increasingly worried that he would get thrown around by stronger opponents.
“I stopped playing basketball freshman year of high school because I was afraid,” admitted Winston. “I was intimidated. I don’t dwell on it but I’ve always regretted that. I didn’t want to do that again when I had the opportunity with something else.”
After high school, Winston was working towards a communications degree in California before eventually transferring to Wagner College in Staten Island. There, he began studying in their arts administration program.
Before he graduated in 2008, he was still skateboarding all the time and he developed an interest in fashion – specifically streetwear. He didn’t have very much interest in making art until he was in his early 20s, however, because he felt the art world was intimidating and accessibility felt rare.
Eventually, he started going to art galleries – but mostly because he was broke and there was free food and free drinks. But he remembers being excited by the conceptual artists who were making art downtown like Agathe Snow, Dan Colen, and Nate Lowman.
“For a while, I had an intense insecurity about being a self-trained artist,” admitted Winston. “But those things all changed my life. They were very defining moments.”
Winston was at MoMA in 2011 when he saw an exhibit on the Dada movement that rocked his world and made him realize he wanted to pursue art in his career. He already had enough regrets about walking away from basketball. He wasn’t going to let that happen again with art.
Early in his career, Winston recalled, his goal was to make work that said something. Winston describes his early work as “very angsty” and some of his earliest themes were anti-government and anti-police.
After graduating, Winston worked as a freelance graphic designer and then in arts programming for MTV. When he wasn’t working, he says he spent a lot of time aimlessly wandering around.
Around 2016, Winston started getting attention after he began working with cigarettes and drug paraphernalia found on the ground to make collages.
“I remember going into his first studio and it smelled like cigarettes,” Roberge said. “I was like: ‘Are you smoking in here?’ And he said: ‘No, it’s that thing on the wall.’ It was one of his pieces.”
Winston was sweeping cigarettes – partially to help the community and partially to find some materials for his art – when he heard some kids in Bed Stuy complaining about how they never fix the basketball nets. Then, he saw a broken net tied to a fence.
Winston often brought stuff back with him to his studio without knowing what to do with them. But that was a light bulb moment. He replaced the nets with new ones and weaved the old ones into a tapestry. It was some of the earliest work he did that dived into “the cross-pollination” of sport and art (and it is something that he is still actively creating – it will be a huge component of his upcoming museum show in Detroit).
Around the same time that he was working with basketball nets, bizarre as it sounds, Winston noticed he was also finding a lot of fish tanks. Winston began smushing basketballs inside them and they looked like basketballs in glass cases. They also looked like Jeff Koons’ One Ball Total Equilibrium Tank (1985). He called them draught sculptures.
“The thing that’s really special to him is that he’s pulling from traditional structures in art history in a way that’s welcoming to people who aren’t familiar,” Parker said. “But he understands that those references are important to the prestige of the work.”
Winston is more than happy to explain how he was influenced by everyone from Koons to Marcel Duchamp, David Hammons, Robert Rauchenberg, and Katy Nolan.
His pieces Don’t Forget To Floss (2019) and Turquoise Apostle (2021) both use a stool. They are clearly inspired by Duchamp’s ready-made Bicycle Wheel (1951).
Much like Duchamp or Piero Manzoni before him, Winston knows exactly what he is talking about as he tries to inject himself into the history of art. Nothing he is doing here is arbitrary.
“I think there are people who think I just came up with some of these things without a reference,” explained Winston. “But I want to elevate things that are considered kitsch to conversations that revolve as much about art history as it does sport.”
“I can have that art history conversation,” he added. “But I also want someone who knows nothing about art history to pique their interest.”
***
Winston was gaining some momentum and signed a lease on his studio space in spring 2020.
But due to concerns surrounding the ongoing pandemic, for obvious reasons, Winston wasn’t going outside as often. So he began thinking about what else he could do besides working with found material like basketballs.
For one series of works, Winston drew from Rauchenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953) and Ai Weiwei’s Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn (1995) with his own version of desecration.
During the peak popularity of ESPN’s The Last Dance docuseries, Winston took authentic basketball memorabilia signed by Michael Jordan and actually signed his own name on top of it for his piece Knock, Knock (2020). He injected himself into Jordan’s greatness and documented the process on film.
“Tyrrell has an interesting palette. He’s an abstract figuration artist,” said Parker, who studied art history while he attended UCLA. “That comes with a lot of pressure to do the work that he does and still keep it innovative and not let people get bored by it. That’s one thing that Tyrrell does extremely well.”
Although he did this a few more times with a few other holy grails, he realized it would be insane to sign so many pieces of memorabilia. Then, Winston started thinking about Cy Twombly, who was an influential 20th-century artist obsessed with Greek mythology.
Winston has long felt that American athletes are the contemporary version of Greek gods, especially when he thinks about the nature of their celebrity status. As it relates to celebrity worship, the concept of autographs always fascinated him.
Winston considered himself a mixed-media, conceptual artist. He said that he had so much reverence for painting that the thought of starting such a venture was unbearable. But nearly two years into the pandemic, Winston confidently says that he now is an all-caps PAINTER. That’s a big deal.
He began this process by painting autographs. This work resonated with Romeo Okwara, a Detroit Lions linebacker who attended the Hail Mary gallery opening.
“I appreciate Tyrrell’s work because he is paying homage to great athletes he is inspired by,” Okwara said. “He seems to carry that same mindset of wanting to achieve greatness at something. That journey shows in his autograph impressions in which he performatively shares an experience of which athletes are accustomed to.”
Another person who was moved by the art was Laura Mott, who is the Senior Curator of Contemporary Art and Design at Cranbrook Art Museum in Detroit.
“Winston is an artist who is able to contribute to one of the core themes of art history, authenticity, through his exploration of the autograph and the personal signature,” Mott explained. “As seen in his series of works in Hail Mary, the notion of identity and celebrity has been increasingly abstracted and diluted.”
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Winston is starting to earn some commercial success, which puts him at a bit of a crossroads.
He doesn’t necessarily want to be someone who makes art for the retail environment, but he is also the only visual artist to have an installation at the flagship store for the wildly popular brand Aimé Leon Dore.
Winston’s work is currently featured at an NBA arena, too. The Cleveland Cavaliers were the first team to ever champion an in-arena art collection and Winston’s work is shown alongside the likes of major artists like KAWS, Shepard Fairey, and Daniel Arsham.
In fact, Arsham was recently hired to become the creative director for the organization. Winston is glad to see an NBA team do more than just find a graffiti font with bright neon colors and a ton of different Photoshop layers.
“I think we’ll see more NBA franchises head in that way,” said Winston, who would love to use his vision to bring artists together to support a pro sports team. “It’s kind of on my bucket list.”
Winston’s bucket list is starting to see more and more items checked off. That’s exciting, of course, but there is some tension that might come with it.
Every artist wants to get noticed. But with an increase in fame, is there any creeping feeling coming in that maybe he is selling out? How does he find that balance of increasing accessibility while also still maintaining a firm presence in the world of fine art?
He recently announced a sneaker collaboration with Reebok, too. His twist on the Reebok Question Mid will include his version of the iconic New York Yankees logo (The Smell of Money) and, as a little nod to his obsession, his own autograph.
Winston will soon start selling hats with a reappropriated logo of the Winston cigarette brand, too.
“Most people think of the art world as this snobby place with elitist types calling the shots,” Winston said. “I want there to be an entry point for people to participate and be curious and not feel intimidated because there is enough intimidating [B.S.] in the art world.”
Winston considers the merchandise and the Reebok collaboration a “cherry on top” of any success that he has had with his art. Right now, however, the artist is singularly focused on his upcoming museum show at Detroit’s Cranbrook Art Museum.
When you think about it, Detroit actually makes a ton of sense as a home for Winston’s art.
Thanks to the explosion of the auto industry in the early 20th century, Detroit was once booming. At one point, it was the fourth-most populous place in the United States. But it has since experienced massive population loss.
The urban decay that Detroit experienced suits Winston’s art perfectly. Like those flattened basketballs, it’s a city forgotten in so many ways and it has welcomed him in with open arms. His work represents rebirth, using nostalgia as a tool to forge something new.
That’s the very ethos and essence of Detroit right now. It’s a place that is feverish for a comeback and it has made massive strides towards a revival over the last few years.
Winston knows New York intimately well. He can’t remember the last time he got lost. Detroit won’t offer that comfort for him — and that’s part of why he’s going. He’ll have to forage in places he’s never seen before.
He doesn’t know for sure what he’ll find, or what he’ll do with it next. That’s why he’s going. That’s why, as his fame grows, he wants to reset.
“It’s so important for me, with this show, to embed myself in that community and understand the lay of the land,” Winston said. “It’s an exciting place. It’s expansive. There are a lot of materials for me to work with. Some of those materials don’t exist in New York City anymore.”
