Art, Promotion, or Both? The "Liberty Portraits" Are a BSE Global Power Move
Stirring and bewildering, the Ticketmaster Plaza exhibit claims to be public-spirited but most serves the brand.
The Barclays Center operator (and Brooklyn Nets/New York Liberty owner) BSE Global this week unveiled “The Liberty Portraits: A Monument to the 2024 Champions,” a public art installation by artist LaToya Ruby Frazier,” on Ticketmaster Plaza.
Time Out New York, fed an exclusive, quoted Frazier as calling it “Brooklyn's own ‘Mount Olympus in front of Barclays.’" (The ten frames rise nine feet.) Fans are enthralled. The installation will last through October, the end of the WNBA season.
On one level, it's impressive: Frazier, a MacArthur Foundation “genius” prize winner—and, notably, a Black woman picturing a mostly Black team in a mostly Black league—captures compelling, uplifting portraits, showing, on each side of the display, the players as resolute athletes and then as humans embedded with family connections and home places.
Frazier describes herself, in a video from the Liberty, as “mostly known for my photographs and the first-person testimonies I create.” The text in that cordoned-off signage pillar pictured above—one of two—states:
In this series of portraits, artist LaToya Ruby Fraser presents both the athletic excellence and personal intimacy of the 2024 New York Liberty team, honoring each champion through family moments captured and meaningful locations alongside their professional triumphs. Inspired by the Statue of Liberty‘s promise of hope and freedom, this installation bears witness to the struggles, victories, and full lives of these championship players, creating a monument to sisterhood and the transformative power of female leadership in sport and beyond.
The “Statue of Liberty’s promise of hope and freedom”? Sure, they’re the New York Liberty, but the Statue’s promise, at a time of President Trump’s crackdown on immigrants, is a tad tarnished.
The Barclays Center page also suggests the installation is “[r]eferencing the heroic scale of the Statue of Liberty.” That’s a stretch; the statue rises 151 feet.
Legibility issues
On another level, the exhibit’s bewildering: the portraits come with no names on front or back, so if you don't know the players, you must decipher some long text—words from or about the players—in small print, which lacks headlines or subheadings.
Fans and even casual observers may know Stewie (Breanna Stewart), JJ (Jonquel Jones), and Sabrina (Ionescu), but c'mon, Marquesha Davis and Jaylyn Sherrod, who barely played?
Others note frustration. “The recent work has some problems,” wrote the New York Times’s Holland Cotter in his mostly positive May 2024 review of Frazier’s Museum of Modern Art show. “Accessibility is one. The printed texts that have become an intrinsic part of Frazier’s format are, for reasons of length, difficult to take in.”
Long texts are fine, but they should be readable. For now, the best tactic may be to take a photo, then blow it up. (Here’s the Stewart text, from her wife.) Beyond adding names, why not offer a QR code to read each text?
Note that the handout images below, from the Barclays Center website, combine front and back into a single panel. Click to enlarge, but you still can’t read the text.
I didn’t read all the panels, but yes, to quote BKMAG1, the text reveals “intimate details… like the etymology of Betnijah Laney-Hamilton’s first name and the story of Sabrina Ionescu’s husband walking away from the NFL to support her.”) He also describes how they share a Romanian heritage and immigrant grit.
A power move
On another level, the exhibit’s also a stone cold power move. “It’s an honor for Barclays Center to be home to LaToya Ruby Frazier’s first public art installation—and for the New York Liberty to be her chosen subject,” said Clara Wu Tsai, BSE Global Vice Chair and Governor of the New York Liberty, in the press release.
“When Clara and I crossed paths at the Gordon Parks Foundation, it felt like the convergence of purpose and possibility,” said Frazier, a longtime Liberty fan, who looks visibly awed at an unveiling with Jones, and was Jumbotron-hailed at Barclays.
Sure, BSE Global might claim this was the artist’s idea. But it obviously serves to advertise the team and the arena. (Also, several days of installation limited Ticketmaster Plaza pedestrian access.)
The installation involves some subtle messaging: in the photos, the players all wear the Liberty’s “Equality” jersey, not their standard garb. That makes the enterprise seem more virtuous.
The exhibit also frames Ticketmaster Plaza—which, in the press release is referred to simply as “the plaza at Barclays Center”—as a civic space, programmed benevolently by BSE Global, rather than promoting a sponsor.2
Similarly, the “You Belong Here”/”We Belong Here” neon art installation above the arena’s transit entrance frames it as civic space, but, as I wrote in 2021, also doubles as advertising.
More art/distraction coming
“Wu Tsai will continue to bring public art to the plaza with a series of temporary new commissions,” advised by a “jury of esteemed art world leaders,” including Thelma Golden, Director of The Studio Museum in Harlem, and Anne Pasternak, Director of the Brooklyn Museum, according to the press release. The 2026 commission will to be announced in the fall.
That helps distract civic leaders from the fact that the plaza, since the arena opening in September 2012, is officially temporary. (Even the City of New York’s official X/Twitter account boosted the Time Out article, instructing, “Be inspired by the journeys of the @nyliberty players.”)
The plaza would be made permanent only after New York State agrees to move the bulk of the unbuilt B1 tower (aka “Miss Brooklyn”), once slated to loom over the arena, across Flatbush Avenue to Site 5, longtime home to P.C. Richard and the now-closed Modell’s3, creating a giant, two-tower project.
That would be another bonus for the arena company, which already benefits from tax-free property (foregone property taxes $123.6M), tax-exempt financing, direct subsidies, tax breaks, state use of eminent domain, and more.
That’s recently helped BSE Global and the Liberty gain new investments at stunning valuations, providing an infusion of cash.
So BSE Global, which would avoid the distraction and disruption of years of construction currently authorized by the Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park plan, should pay for the privilege of a permanent plaza. Joe Tsai and Clara Wu Tsai, plus minority shareholders the Koch family, can afford it.
Instead, they “give” us—and their fans—art.
Who’s missing?
Two players from the 2024 team are absent. According to the arena’s page on art, “Due to scheduling, portraits of Ivana Dojkić and Courtney Vandersloot will be included in the final installation of the series, to be presented on the suite level of Barclays Center and completing the 2024 Championship team.”
Hmm. They just happen to be two of the three 2024 players who are no longer with the team. (“Sloot” was fifth in minutes played, later eclipsed by Leonie Fiebich.)
Also confusing is the absence of Coach Sandy Brondello, who's surely more key to the Liberty's success than a good chunk of the roster. She too deserves a “monument to sisterhood and the transformative power of female leadership.”
It seems like a missed opportunity. Then again, if they included Brondello, they might have had to include General Manager Jonathan Kolb, a man, who built the team. That would’ve diluted the message.
Note: I’ll publish a Bi-Weekly Digest next Sunday.
BKMAG’s coverage, as is typical, doesn’t disclose it’s owned by BSE Global.
The arena’s separate page on art does use the term Ticketmaster Plaza.
The Modell’s building this fall will become the temporary home of BSE Global’s Brooklyn Basketball youth program.