The sheer number of painted basketball courts that we see in the last two years makes us think there may be an evolving new category of art practice somewhere between street art, land art, billboard takeovers, and municipal public art. Clearly, a coffee table book will arrive here shortly.
Today we have a new project in “Valco San Paolo” by Greg Jager. The press release describes the design challenges of creating something for a population that lives on a tract of land that is “not a real neighborhood, not a suburb, not even a victim of that phenomenon that some have called beautification.”
Nonetheless, we soldier on. The artist says the result here is “Tiber Courtyard, a hybrid intervention between art and design curated by Michele Trimarchi that investigates the theme of coexistence in the public space.” Thusly, it is appropriate for “a territory made up of contradictions, multitudes, and balances.”
And you can play basketball upon it.
Tiber Courtyard is part of Cantieri San Paolo, a project of the Municipality VIII of Rome Capital with the support of the Lazio Region and produced by the cultural association Dominio Pubblico.