Victor Solomon is an artist and basketball fan whose work explores the NBA and it’s familiar iconography using antiquated and sophisticated media like stained glass and gold leaf printing. He is probably best known for his installations of stained glass backboards. Including a gallery show that took place during last year’s NBA All-Star game.
Solomon spoke with The Step Back about his work, his process and his newest project — the VS X NBA Crystal Print Series, on sale now.
The Step Back: For people who aren’t familiar with your work, can you share a little about your background as an artist and as a basketball fan?
Victor Solomon: Sure. I mean the second one really informs the first one. I grew up in Boston initially and, as I’m sure you can imagine when you’re born there you get handed a Celtics jersey and a Patriots jersey, and a Red Sox jersey, of course. So, I’ve always been a big basketball fan and I just stuck with it throughout my journey, moving across the country to San Francisco and working as an artist and filmmaker in different capacities, and experimenting with different mediums.
But my love of the game always stuck with me and I just kind of got curious about the material of stained glass and the rich history it had from medieval times of being the symbol of power and wealth. And as mainstream culture caught up with my love of the game, I mean I’m sure it’s not lost on you how much more popular basketball has gotten in the past five years, just seeing these guys as they transformed into these cultural figures that were really dictating a lot of aesthetic choices that people were making, and how it had all these great parallels with kings of medieval times and the power they had over their kingdoms.
So, I just sort of got interested in stained glass in that way and went to a studio in San Francisco and apprenticed under these old-timers that had been doing it their whole lives. They taught me all the moves and how to work on the craft of stained glass, which led into making the first stained glass backboard, which I had never intended to turn into a career or anything more than a personal project of mine. I just made the first one and put it on my own social media and got a bunch of attention and press, so it really tapped into something that I think people were curious about and I’ve just kind of been riding that wave ever since.
TSB: It seems like there is a growing basketball art community, I mean we work with a lot of illustrators and graphic designers. But it seems like you don’t see a lot of physical, 3-D, sculptural basketball art. And illustrators and painters all have different styles but a lot of if seems to be coming from a similar kind of aesthetic. What you’re doing just seems so far removed from everything else that’s out there. How do you see your work fitting into the larger landscape?
Solomon: That’s a really nice thing to hear. For me, it kind of feels like a really obvious connection that I made in the sort of royalty surrounding the court and all the iconography, double-entendres and metaphors that go with it. But I think the thing that feels nice is that I kind of organically stumbled into this lane that, like you mentioned, aesthetically, there wasn’t much in but I think it’s something people are really gravitating towards. It’s a very fun moment to be pursuing this project.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BfJOPUrnpvD/?taken-by=victorsolomon
TSB: What’s the progression, what’s next? What’s growing out of this artistic thread you’re pulling on?
Solomon: I’m really trying to let the project sort of dictate where it wants to go. Sort of reacting to how people are engaging with and enjoying the project. This most recent thing is a huge honor, to be collaborating with the league on a set of prints to celebrate each of the teams.
I basically came up with this process to gold foil stamp onto this clean poly material and float it in this really nice glass frame and did an interpretation of each team to try and develop something a bit more sophisticated and really celebrate the relationship between fan and team. The idea with all of this stuff is taking these icons of sport and logos, and instruments of the sport and elevating them with these different processes and materials.
TSB: This project also seemed like an interesting bridge because there are a thousand of each logo and they’re being sold, so you’re also connecting to commerce and this commodification of these logos and icons?
Solomon: That’s the hope. When we started embarking on this project, the NBA reached out to me, they liked what I had been doing, they were curious if there were any ideas we could collaborate on. And really the idea I’d been thinking about was creating a moment for the “grown-up fan” to celebrate the team that they root for. You know, you can’t always put a poster of LeBron dunking in your office or it doesn’t make sense in your grown-up apartment to have a post of Kyrie. This felt like a cool way to take this work I’d been doing and bring it to where people could have a piece of it in their personal space.
TSB: In doing this work, do you feel like you’ve been integrated into a larger community of basketball artists?
Solomon: It’s been very cool to get to know some other people who are playing with the medium and sort of celebrating it in their own way. Like a lot of those illustrators I’ve been getting to know and it’s cool to see people bring their creativity to the sport and help continue to tell this story.