“James Fiorentino and Friends” exhibit brings new sport art to the National Art Museum of Sport.

“James Fiorentino and Friends” at the National Art Museum of Sport at University Place – IUPUI includes watercolors by the young New Jersey sport artist and that of older artists who have influenced him plus emerging sports artists he has befriended.

Fiorentino’s insightful, realistic watercolors have been a part of the National Art Museum of Sport since soon after Fiorentino, now 31, graduated from Drew University. He already had a resume to be envied by much older artists: A painting of Reggie Jackson in the Baseball Hall of Fame when he was 15, membership in the New York Society of Illustrators at 19, contracts with baseball card companies, and work in national publications.

Work loaned to the exhibit includes the oil “Jackie Robinson” by Bart Forbes, whose distinctive paintings have been turned into magazine covers and posters as well as hanging in the collections of professional golfers, presidents and corporations. In his long, still active career, he has covered nearly every sport including the PGA, NFL and Olympic movement.

Rhoda Sherbell, the New York sculptor whose “Casey Stegel” stands in the courtyard of University Place, has loaned a 21-inch bronze maquette of “Baseball Family.” A 9-1/2 foot tall bronze of the grouping stands at the Sea Dogs ballpark in Portland, Me. Sherbell, along with Peter Corbin of Millbrook, N.Y., and Ray Ellis of Martha’s Vineyard, Mass., are artists represented in the National Art Museum of Sport whose work has been admired by Fiorentino for their fine art approach to sport scenes. In addition to work already in the NAMOS collection, Corbin, who celebrates hunting, fishing and the out-of-door, is represented in this exhibit by “The Spey Rod,” a fishing scene.

·           Murray Tinkelman, both an educator and illustrator, contributed a drawing of Joe DiMaggio. He has known Fiorentino since James was a teenager choosing a college and Tinkelman was teaching at Syracuse University. Fiorentino was attracted to Syracuse because of its art program but it had no baseball team. Tinkelman advised him to pick a school where he could play baseball – “You’re already making money with art.” He chose Drew in Madison, N.J., where he was short-stop on the baseball team for four years.

            Work loaned by Greg and George Vlosich III, Cleveland brothers who are following James into sport art, include George’s Etch a Sketch portrait of Cal Rifken Jr.– as a child George mastered creating drawings on an Etch a Sketch, a skill he developed into sports portraits. Both he and his artist brother, a basketball player, work together with sports team clients.

·           Another unusual medium on exhibit is Benjamin Blackburn’s carved cedar baseball bats. The Springfield, Ill., artist is also represented by a mahogany figure of Mickey Mantel and a bas relief of Jackie Robinson.

            The exhibit will be on display until March 15, 2009.

 

Poems about National Art Museum of Sport art matched with paintings in Sporting Words