The game of baseball as it is conjured in the imagination often takes precedence over the game as it is played on the field. It is not surprising, therefore, that baseball has been such an attractive subject for artists down through the years. Painters, sculptors, musicians, performing artists, poets, writers, photographers, and filmmakers have contributed an enormous body of baseball-inspired work to American culture.

        The Baseball Reliquary will present “The Interior Diamond: Baseball and the Arts” from July 1-August 31, 2001 at the Pasadena Central Library, Pasadena, California. The month-long exhibition in the Reference & Business Wing and Ria C. Lee Humanities Wing will showcase artists whose work draws inspiration and content from baseball and will include paintings, collages, photographs, and mixed-media works. Among the artists to be featured are Ben Sakoguchi, Greg Jezewski, Michael Guccione, and Lou Darvas.

•         Pasadena-based painter and mixed-media artist Ben Sakoguchi, whose work is currently on view at the Corcoran Gallery of Art’s 46th Biennial Exhibition, will be represented with baseball-themed paintings from his Orange Crate Label Series. In this series of ongoing paintings, Sakoguchi adopts the colorful format of these quintessentially mid-century California advertisements to satirize belief systems and cultural celebrities and to comment on racism and social injustice.

•         Greg Jezewski’s paintings and assemblages make extensive use of visual puns and humor, integrating baseball imagery with elements found in the lowbrow culture of monster movies and comic books. His works comment on subjects ranging from evolution and death to the corruption of sports through overcommercialization. A graduate of the Otis Art Institute and a former semi-professional ballplayer, Jezewski is drawn to the metaphorical nature of baseball: “I can’t hit people over the head with a baseball bat, so I paint.” His work has been featured at Zero One Gallery in Los Angeles and in the pages of Juxtapoz magazine.

•         A Chicago Art Institute graduate, Michael Guccione is a Pasadena-based painter whose recent work has explored the lives of Catholic saints and baseball players. He will be represented by his portrait of a bespectacled, erratic sidearm pitcher, perhaps better known as the Prime Minister of Cuba, Fidel Castro. The Cuban leader, whose fastball and curve were referred to as “fat pitches” by opposing players, is depicted by Guccione in the uniform of the Barbudos (“The Bearded Ones”), a team of ragtag revolutionaries for which Castro occasionally played after he came to power. A former player, recalling that Castro used to hang out at the ballpark as a youth, remarked, “If we’d known he wanted to be a dictator, we’d have made him an umpire.” Guccione’s devotional icon painting of Jackie Robinson, who broke baseball’s “color barrier” in 1947, will also be exhibited.

          For further information, contact the Baseball Reliquary by phone at (626) 791-7647 or by e-mail at skpubs@earthlink.net.

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