When pitcher Ryne Stanek put the finishing touches on the New York Mets’ 7-2 victory over the Boston Red Sox, it was clear that Tuesday was a perfect night. To be fair, it started that way too, with Sarah Sze releasing the first release and the first 15,000 fans receiving a baseball cap emblazoned with a blue and orange fragmented globe designed by the artist.
The game marked the third and final edition of the Mets’ “Artist Series” program, where the team ditched the more typical bobblehead giveaways for items created by the best contemporary artists. In May, the team released a beach bag designed by artist and former art dealer Joel Mesler, and in July fans were treated to bucket hats designed by Rashid Johnson, who is set for a mid-career survey at the Guggenheim in Nova York next year. .
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As Mesler said ARTnews before the season, the project arose from a trip to the stadium. Last year, Mets owner Steve Cohen, an art collector, invited Johnson, Mesler, Jeff Koons and other artists to watch a game from the executive box. There, the conversation turned to the art collection of Cohen and his wife Alexandra, and New York as the de facto capital of the art world. Cohen, Mesler said, came up with the idea for the gifts and his daughter Sophie acted as an informal curator.
Sophie Cohen, who served as Associate Director at Gagosian for five years, recently launched Siren Project, an artistic advisory and curatorial consultancy for leading and emerging collectors, institutions and brands. for the genesis of the idea, Cohen said ARTnews this week that it was Sze’s turn to join after working together at Gagosian, which represents the artist.
“We wanted to focus on New York-based artists for the first year,” Cohen said. “Sarah felt like the perfect artist for it. She represents New York in a beautiful way.”
Although Sze’s practice includes painting, drawing, printmaking and video, she has become best known for her dense assemblages of everyday objects that explore history, technology, globalization, information, interconnection, the internet and memory. The Mets cap’s fragmented globe appears to echo its 2022 installation at LaGuardia Airport, Shorter than the dayin which hundreds of photographs of the New York skyline at different times of the day form a sphere.
The cap, like Mesler’s bag and Johnson’s hat, came as a collaboration between the artist, Cohen and the Mets’ marketing team.
“We’re dealing with giveaways, which the Mets have a specific protocol for. The Mets have their own manufacturers for giveaways and there are limits to what they can do. We had to focus on things that can be mass produced and given out, without were dangerous to the players,” Cohen said.
“From there, we talk to the artists about what was well received, and what we think would look better with their work. Then we were working from sketches and going back and forth to get to the best version.”
As Cohen explained, one of the main attractions for the artists was the opportunity to give back to the New York community. Each artist, instead of taking a commission, chose a charity for the team to donate to as well. Johnson, for example, chose Laundromat Project, a Brooklyn-based arts nonprofit that funds community art projects and local artists.
Steve and Alexandra Cohen are ARTnews Top 200 collectors with a collection that includes world-class works by Willem de Kooning, Andy Warhol, Pablo Picasso, Jasper Johns, Jeff Koons and Jackson Pollock. The Cohens said they own works by Johnson.
Now, tens of thousands of Mets fans are also art collectors, thanks to the giveaways.
“Many of the artists we are working with have a price where it is very difficult to own their work. But the gifts democratize their work,” Cohen said. “This is very different from my normal work [at Gagosian and elsewhere]. Getting a piece isn’t about access. It’s just about being one of the first 15,000 people in the game. It’s something beautiful and it resonates a lot with the artists.”
