Harper’s is thrilled to announce Courtside Sermon, New York–based artist Noel W Anderson’s first solo presentation with the gallery. The exhibition brings together a new body of tapestries that extend Anderson’s ongoing investigation into how Black culture is mediated through intersecting networks of the sports and entertainment industries. Courtside Sermon opens Thursday, February 19, 6–8pm, with a reception attended by the artist.
Working primarily with digitally distorted imagery culled from media archives, Anderson translates photographs of NBA players and iconic soul singers into dynamically produced jacquard textiles that bear the marks of intensive, process-based labor. Upon approaching the gallery window, viewers will encounter a juxtaposition that establishes the exhibition’s central premise: a tapestry of a composited, chimera-like Nina Simone paired with a smaller weaving of Magic Johnson gazing toward her. This relational dynamic continues to unfold in the exhibition space, where multiple works depicting stills from televised basketball games are anchored by a monumental tapestry of James Brown preaching, drawn from the film The Blues Brothers. The presentation is orchestrated in such a way that the body language of both players and fans appears to register Brown’s and Simone’s exhortations, as figures lean toward, listen into, or are moved by the performers’ sonic vibrations. Their stances, torqued by Anderson’s digital manipulations before ever reaching the loom, establish a context in which the spectacular nature of these performances becomes a site of both instability and metamorphosis, further accentuated through Anderson’s transformative material processes.
To create this series, the artist engages multiple stages of production involving a range of collaborators. After altering his digital images, he outsources fabrication to commercial textile studios before applying his own hand to recast the compositions into unique, multilayered artworks. Upon receiving the machine-made tapestries, the images undergo a profound formal and conceptual alteration. Embracing both additive and subtractive approaches, Anderson distresses the interwoven fibers through abrasion techniques such as rubbing with steel wire brushes, applying ink dyes, and, in some cases, bleaching solutions. From there, he plucks threads to further intensify this coercive procedure, punctuating the surfaces with sinuous traces of vibrant color. Occasionally, he adds collaged elements made from the same synthetic skin used for basketballs. The resulting materiality of the tapestries takes on a fur-like texture, as the woven substrates are exposed and the thread’s binding points verge on breaking down. As with everything in Anderson’s practice, this suite of weavings presents a cohesive aesthetic in which media, method, and subject matter converge into a unified expression of Black experience as shaped by contemporary systems of representation.
Reaching back to the long history of Black entertainment, Courtside Sermon situates Anderson’s work within a lineage that examines the relationship between popular cultural tropes and art-historical techniques. Adopting styles that range from Pointillism to Futurism, his fragmented images collapse pixels into granular fields that recall Seurat’s optical experiments, while layered exposures echo the Futurist fascination with speed, force, and unstable perception. Applied to images of recognizable Black performers—and, conversely, to the sea of mass audiences witnessing these events—such interventions simultaneously enshrine and undermine celebrity mythology through acts of material abrasion and rupture. Fabricated by an automated jacquard loom and then aggressively worked by hand, the tapestries foreground a charged tension between image and labor that exposes an estrangement between mechanization and touch, underscoring the fraught histories embedded in textile production. As Anderson emphasizes, the plucked threads in particular “implicate the histories of cotton and coerced Black labor,” taking on a new form of agency as he “reframes ‘picking’ into a creative act of insistence.” The figures he portrays, alongside the techniques that give them shape, appear simultaneously exalted and unsettled, ultimately asking whether Black culture can be understood as a stable category as it is broadcast through the entertainment industry.
Noel W Anderson (b. 1981, Louisville, KY) received an MFA from Yale University in 2010, an MFA from Indiana University in 2007, and a BFA from Ohio Wesleyan University in 2003. He has participated in artist residencies at institutions including EFA Studio Program, New York; and Dieu Donné, New York. Most recently, Anderson’s work has been the subject of solo presentations at the State University of New York, Albany (2025); Zidoun-Bossuyt Gallery, Paris, Dubai, and Luxembourg (2023, 2022, and 2017); Salzburger Kunstverein, Salzburg (2023); KMAC Contemporary Art Museum, Louisville (2022); Sotheby’s, Paris (2022); Fondazione Mudima, Milan (2021); and Telfair Museums, Savannah (2021). His work has been included in group exhibitions, most recently at Kalamazoo Institute of the Arts, Kalamazoo, MI (2025); the 15th Gwangju Biennial, Gwangju (2024); International Objects, Brooklyn (2024); Harper’s, East Hampton (2024); Frac-Sud Cité de l’art contemporain, Marseille (2024); The Hole, New York (2023); Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2022); Zidoun-Bossuyt Gallery, Dubai (2022); and Speed Art Museum, Louisville (2021). Anderson’s work has been acquired by numerous collections, including Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; International Center of Photography, New York; University of Chicago, IL; AC Hudgens Collection, New York; Frac-Sud Cité de l’art contemporain, Marseille; and MUDAM, Luxembourg. He lives and works in New York City.