Exhibition play

Grant Hill knows it’s isolating to be both a professional basketball player and a serious art collector, but it was never clearer than the night he launched a national tour of his private treasure of African American paintings and sculptures. Hill had invited all of his teammates from the Orlando Magic. Just one showed up.

“So,” Hill sighed, “we’ve got a way to go.”

In a move curators say is extraordinary, Hill, 31, has offered up 46 works from his collection for an exhibition on tour through spring 2006. “Something All Our Own: The Grant Hill Collection of African American Art” premiered in November in Orlando, Fla., moved on to New Orleans in winter and finished its summer stay in Houston on Aug. 31. Over the next 18 months it will stop in Baltimore; Dallas; Springfield, Mass.; and then Durham, N.C.

“In the black community, especially, it’s important for young boys and girls to see African Americans who have done well and been successful. In the inner city we need that,” Hill said. “I’m a big believer that outside of athletes and entertainers, we need more examples of African American, successful people.”

The decision by a professional U.S. athlete to offer up his art collection for national exhibition may be unprecedented. “It’s the first time I’ve ever had this experience, and I’ve never been aware of any exhibitions at our country’s larger museums,” said Alvia Wardlaw, for 14 years curator of modern and contemporary art at Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts, the home of the nation’s largest collection of African American art.

Wherever the exhibition has shown, it has attracted visitors of all ages and colors, including some fans who know less about art than about the NBA. But the exhibition is also drawing an older crowd with more traditional tastes. They are discovering in Hill a precocious collector with an eye for works that articulate the black American experience, especially in the South.

On a recent weekday afternoon, 69-year-old Ronald C. Sharpe came with his wife, daughter and 19-month-old grandson to the museum at Houston’s historically black Texas Southern University.

“I had heard he was an art collector,” Sharpe said, “but I didn’t know he had all this.”

Hill’s opening at TSU drew about 450 people -- the largest opening in that museum’s history.

“We’re getting hoards of people in here, which is unusual for us,” said Natasha L. Turner, spokeswoman for the university’s museum.

Among the show’s highlights are several sculptures and lithographs by Elizabeth Catlett as well as several paintings by Harlem artist Romare Bearden. There is also a nearly life-size painting by Edward Jackson that is arresting for the rare moment in which it captures Malcolm X -- with a relaxed, broad smile across his face.

Next to each work, Hill has posted a sentence or two about his emotional reaction or connection to the piece. Alongside Arthello Beck Jr.’s “Confrontation” (1969), in which a black man wrestles with two other figures, Hill writes: “I grew up with this painting, and just as my father is attached to it because it reflects the historic struggle of the black male, so am I.”

Valerie Cassel Oliver, associate curator at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, said Hill’s exhibition dispels the “cars and home” myth about what professional athletes can do with their immense wealth.

“When you have that sort of breadth of work by artists like Catlett and Bearden, who have been such important artists in terms of production and advocacy, it’s a coup,” she said. “I think it’s important that [Hill] is collecting, and I think he has some important works.”

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog published by Duke University Press that contains an appreciation of Duke alumnus Hill by Blue Devils basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski as well as an introduction by John Hope Franklin, the author and former Duke professor of art history and law.

Grant and his father also contribute an essay. “ ... we are disappointed that African American achievement and artistry are more recognized and appreciated in sports and entertainment than in painting or sculpture,” they write. “More people know Grant Hill than know Romare Bearden yet Bearden’s career had a longer shelf life and more productivity than that of any professional athlete.”

The words have been chosen carefully, but the message is clear: Grant Hill wants to distinguish himself from black professional athletes who have not capitalized on the tremendous power and influence they wield. Many are known for encouraging young fans to work toward athletic goals but in public, at least, they have mostly shied away from inducements beyond sports.

Hill was careful, in a telephone interview, not to criticize his colleagues, but he is stern about the goals to which he believes black men of his wealth and education should aspire. And he’s doing it amid competing pressures in popular culture: to project a “bad boy” image that helps maintain street credibility and to blossom into a clean-cut role model.

“Hopefully, what I’m doing will stimulate other African American athletes to do things that are outside the box. I’m sure they have interests that don’t fit into the stereotypical athlete, but maybe this will give them confidence to show that side,” Hill said. “I’m also trying to expose the genre of African American art to the world -- it’s a little underappreciated.”

But Hill bristles when asked about the conflict between low expectations for black professional athletes and the simultaneous burden on a few to comport themselves like saints.

“Some successful African American athletes unfairly get criticized for what they do or what they don’t do. I do know that some of the individuals do some things quietly that aren’t publicized,” he said.

Andria Boateng, 23, saw the Hill exhibition recently on her way back to Harvard Law School for her third year. She acknowledged the powerful negative messages about image and lifestyle that bombard young people, especially black children.

“Perhaps in the black culture it’s up to successful individuals to reach out and help any way they can,” she said. “These black professionals who turn a blind eye.... “ Boateng trailed off, looking around the museum, then said she didn’t want to judge anyone. “ ... This is just so great.”

In conjunction with the exhibition, Hill has awarded $2,500 scholarships to four visual arts students. And at every stop on the tour, he has arranged for busloads of inner-city students to tour the museums. He says the scholarships and tours are his way of “giving back,” although it’s not a matter of staying true to inner-city roots; Hill was a middle-class kid from the suburbs.

Although a significant number of his NBA colleagues have used basketball as a way out of the projects, Hill grew up in Reston, Va., just outside of Washington, D.C. Calvin and Janet Hill’s home was a place with fine art on the walls before their only child, Grant, could walk. Calvin graduated from Yale University and then played for the Dallas Cowboys. Janet was one of six black women in a class of nearly 500 at Wellesley College in 1969. (One of the other black students was Wardlaw, the curator of the exhibition.)

“Grant grew up in an environment where social issues were discussed and so were the evolved artistic tastes of his parents,” Wardlaw said.

Hill graduated from Duke as the No. 1 draft pick by the Detroit Pistons in 1994 and went on to become NBA Rookie of the Year. Almost immediately, he said, he began using his pro ball salary to collect art, taking cues from another NBA player, Darrell Walker. Hill calls Walker “the godfather of basketball players who collect African American art.”

To top off what many consider his charmed life, Hill married the glamorous Grammy-nominated singer/songwriter Tamia. He credits her as a potent influence on the decision to share his collection with the public, as well as to call the project “Something All Our Own.”

Regardless of the show’s popularity, Hill doesn’t plan to add any stops to a tour he accompanies for at least one night in each city.

“They want their art back in the house,” Wardlaw said. But right now, visitors are coming to see something of a spectacle -- a professional athlete who is solemnly committed to collecting art, and who intends to remain so, long after his body is too old for the game of basketball.

“The fusion of athletics, celebrity and art intrigues people,” Wardlaw said. “His wife is a recognized singer, so she brings her own kind of excitement to the situation. His father has his following. People come, in part, because they’re curious.

“It’s a life lesson for young people to see an athlete who is multidimensional.”