Shaunté Glover explores the muscular narrative power—and queer, femme force—of women’s basketball through the lens of South Phoenix.
Phoenix, Arizona | shaunteglover.com | @shaunte
It’s hard to overstate the alchemical potential of mementos and personal effects in art. When used well (see Carrie Mae Weems and Tracey Emin) they behave like metals, conducting concepts from their original owner to the viewer with crackling electricity. They are pre-localized power objects, tethered to specific people and sites and primed to magnetically tug us into their stories.
Shaunté Glover found just such a current in the material culture of basketball. Nationally, the sport is notorious for its opulent-turned-iconographic ephemera, Air Jordans on down. Locally, Glover was once a notorious baller in South Phoenix, or at least in neighborhood pick-up games on the cul-de-sac at 8th Place.
Glover’s sculpture series about women’s basketball, a primary focus in recent years, is a muscular blend of cultural and personal narratives. It’s also lush, soft, delicate—plainly femme and queer, and unafraid to denote these qualities as pillars of the sport.
The artist bedazzles a regulation ball with gold hoop earrings, enrobes a Nike Air Force 1 in undulating yarn, weaves braid jewelry onto nets, and—in the magnum opus Black Superman (2024)—sculpts a basketball rack like one of John Cage’s prepared pianos. Among many altered objects on the rack is a hoop netted with cassette tape, gutted from a mixtape by a formerly incarcerated family member.
Glover earned her BFA in fine-art photography from Arizona State University, and maintains avid photography and filmmaking practices. Like her sculptures, these bodies of work are all about instinctual flow—no need to be emphatic, just trust the sparky materials. A portrait series of her Phoenix-area pals—a rockstar circle of young artists of color linked to the artist-run space Eye Lounge—paints an overwhelmingly cool picture of the city.
Lucky for us, coolness allows for vulnerability in the contemporary moment. In an Instagram video series endearingly titled Art Twenty-Something (after the PBS series Art21), she reflects on her recent artistic growth: “Imagine the ground with a flower coming up, and then pulling the flower out, and then having just these really, really long roots.”
