CLEVELAND CAVALIERS AND DANIEL ARSHAM, THE COUPLING WE NEVER EXPECTED
The worlds of basketball and contemporary art collide in an unprecedented union between NBA team Cleveland Cavaliers and contemporary artist Daniel Arsham. As announced on 17th November 2020, the artist has taken on the role of Creative Director within the organisation. But what will his new position entail, and how did this groundbreaking alliance come to fruition?
This is not Arsham’s first dalliance with creative partners outside of contemporary art. Co-founder of Brooklyn-based Snarkitecture, Arsham is just as well known for investigating the boundary between sculpture and architecture as he is for building exciting partnerships with the likes of Pharrell, Porsche and Dior. His union with the Cleveland Cavaliers is in many respects on brand.
As newly appointed Creative Director, Arsham outlined his far-reaching mastery over the team’s visual identity in an interview with Artnet News. He revealed plans to design new apparel, jerseys, the team’s home court, capsule collections and other merchandise, as well as to curate the Cavs’ social media presence through self-authored graphics and video content. In the pipeline waits a major renovation of the walk-in tunnel at Rocket Mortgage Fieldhouse, the team’s home arena, among other projects to redesign several public courts throughout Cleveland.
The reason behind Arsham’s appointment goes beyond his trailblazer reputation. In a letter addressed to the city of Cleveland, posted on his Instagram, the artist opened up about his personal ties to the team's home. “I am a third-generation Clevelander,” he writes. “My family can trace its roots back to 1908 when my great-grandfather first arrived as an immigrant to build his life here. He came to this country with nothing, and like many hard-working Clevelanders, he built his business from the ground up. […] The Land is a part of me.”
The NBA itself has long held sway over certain aspects of popular culture and the arts, an example being the ‘tunnel fits’ debuted by individual, big-name athletes like LeBron James and Russell Westbrook which cause sartorial buzz for days on social media. The partnership between the Cleveland Cavaliers and Daniel Arsham is therefore one which recognises the mutual benefit of these two, otherwise unrelated worlds coming together. And Arsham believes in its credibility, claiming, “If Warhol was around today, he’d be the creative director of the Knicks. He would have known what to do there.”