In 2025, Takashi Murakami reimagined Los Angeles Dodgers merchandise with a collection featuring his unmistakable smiling flowers, vibrant palette, and Japanese katakana lettering. Released in tandem with the team’s World Series championship, the collaboration blurred the line between licensed apparel and collectible artwork—the familiar jersey became a wearable extension of Murakami’s artistic practice.
The collaboration arrived with sports merchandise having already moved beyond souvenirs. Jerseys, sneakers, and collectibles have become cultural objects, carrying the visual language of contemporary artists into stadiums, streets, and secondary markets. Long before artists began designing objects associated with fandom, athletes were already subjects of artistic inquiry. Sports have offered artists a language for exploring movement, identity, celebrity, competition, and cultural memory. Today, artists are not only depicting sports; they are shaping the objects through which sports culture is experienced.
“There’s always been a history of Western art—and in various other art forms or traditions—representing athletes,” artist Hank Willis Thomas says. “It’s an ancient correlation between representation, art, and sports.”
From Greek sculpture and Roman mosaics depicting athletic competition to Francisco Goya’s La Tauromaquia, jousting reliefs, Jean Metzinger’s Cubist cyclist, and Katsushika Hokusai’s rikishi wrestlers, artists have long turned to sports to examine power, spectacle, beauty, and identity. In the 20th century, that dialogue continued through artists like Andy Warhol, whose series “Athletes” immortalized sporting figures including Muhammad Ali and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, as well as Jean-Michel Basquiat, who repeatedly referenced boxing, baseball, and Black sports icons in his work. Jeff Koons’s “Equilibrium” sculptures and Roy Lichtenstein, Jacob Lawrence, and Barkley L. Hendricks’s early basketball paintings further expanded the ways athletics could be represented in contemporary art.
The Olympic Games, perhaps the world’s most recognizable sporting event, have a long tradition of artist-designed posters that transform competition into visual culture. Across decades, artists including LeRoy Neiman, David Hockney, Ernie Barnes, Rachel Whiteread, and Clotilde Jiménez have contributed works that commemorate the event while reflecting their own distinct artistic languages.
Contemporary artists continue to mine athletics as subject matter. Tschabalala Self’s 2020 painting Sprewell—which depicts a couple embracing, with one figure wearing a jersey honoring New York Knicks icon Latrell Sprewell—recently resurfaced as the Knicks captured the 2026 NBA championship, demonstrating how sports imagery continues to circulate through cultural moments. Artists including Alvin Armstrong, Jansson Stegner, and Esmaa Mohamoud have similarly turned to athletes to explore identity, memory, and representation.
As sport evolved aesthetically, its visual language became inseparable from the competition itself. Logos became symbols of belonging, uniforms expressions of identity, and sneakers design objects in their own right. Merchandise, too, became a way for fans to signal their connection to teams, players, and moments.
“Sport is probably one of the most ubiquitous forms of human interaction in the world,” Thomas says. “It’s also a huge design element. You see it in the branding, the uniforms, and the way sports are promoted and commemorated. It’s always been a marriage between art, design, and sports.”
Murakami’s Dodgers collection exemplifies this shift. Rather than simply placing artwork onto apparel, the collaboration fused his recognizable visual vocabulary with one of baseball’s most iconic franchises. His smiling flowers and Japanese typography transformed championship merchandise into something that resonated with collectors, fashion audiences, and lifelong Dodgers fans alike. The demand for these collaborations is reflected in their rapid sellouts and emergence on secondary markets, where limited-edition releases circulate among collectors on platforms like StockX and Grailed.
That logic extends beyond apparel. Limited-edition skateboard decks are another avenue for artists to reinterpret functional objects as collectible works. The Skateroom has collaborated with artists like Cindy Sherman, Luc Tuymans, Mickalene Thomas, and Hikari Shimoda to transform the skateboard into both sporting equipment and a contemporary artwork.
Other collaborations reveal the range of possibilities within the space. Hebru Brantley’s partnership with the Chicago Bulls and Daniel Arsham’s appointment as creative director of the Cleveland Cavaliers demonstrate how artists can reshape a franchise’s visual identity. In 2024, Romero Britto brought his signature pop exuberance to the Miami Heat through a collection of T-shirts, bags, backpacks, and a Wilson basketball, all adorned with his recognizable patterns, bold colors, and geometric motifs.
Thomas has explored this intersection firsthand through his collaboration with Bleacher Report and Mitchell & Ness, joining a growing group of contemporary artists delving into sports apparel. For him, jerseys are not simply objects of fandom; they are carriers of memory, identity, and cultural history.
For artist Victor Solomon, the connection between art and sports comes from the shared language embedded within competition itself. “There’s a meritocracy in sport that is clean,” he says. “It’s one of the few areas in life where there’s a very distinct goal everyone on the field or court is in pursuit of, and everyone watching has a clear understanding of what that goal is.” That philosophy is central to Solomon’s practice, which transforms basketballs, trophies, and other sporting objects into sculptural works that examine craftsmanship, luxury, and athletic culture. His collaborations with the NBA and WNBA—including work on the NBA’s postseason trophy suite and the WNBA’s end-of-season and event trophies—reflect the growing conversation between sports, art, and design.
Chicago-born artist Julian Gaines’s relationship with sports began long before his career as an artist. A former collegiate athlete, Gaines turned toward art after an injury redirected his path, finding a creative expression rooted in identity, Black ephemera, and sports culture. His work explores the visual and cultural connections between athletics and everyday life, including footwear collaborations with Nike.
“What I started to realize was, art propels athletics,” Gaines says. “Aesthetics drive an athlete. We always play better and feel better when we look better.” And the commonalities don’t end there. “There’s freedom or creativity that is quite prevalent within both art and athletics,” he says. “The discipline required in athletics is similar to the discipline required in art.”
That same fluid relationship between creativity and sport is central to Shema Love’s artistry. Her collections with the WNBA explore the intersection of fashion, culture, and basketball—a connection she says never needed explaining. “They were just never separate for me,” she says. “I grew up as an athlete, and I grew up as an artist. Being able to bring sports to life through apparel and fashion in a way that feels beyond just the game is what made it important for me to connect the two.”
Love approaches merchandise less as fan gear than fashion design. “I’m just a fashion girl,” she says. “Being able to design merch that’s fashion-forward, rather than just putting words or a logo on a T-shirt, was my desire.” That intention became reality when WNBA legend Lisa Leslie wore one of Love’s jerseys courtside during All-Star Weekend, creating a full-circle moment for a league that once offered few options beyond standard logo apparel.
Sports have inspired artists for centuries. Increasingly, the exchange runs both ways: Artists are shaping how sports are seen, worn, and remembered. The jersey, once a symbol of allegiance alone, has become a fashion object, a collectible, and a canvas. In that shift, the material culture surrounding sports—the uniforms, trophies, and merchandise—becomes part of the spectacle itself.
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