By the time pitcher Ryne Stanek put the finishing touches on the New York Mets’ 7-2 win over the Boston Red Sox, it was clear that Tuesday was a picture-perfect night. To be fair, it started out that way, too, with Sarah Sze throwing out the first pitch and the first 15,000 fans receiving a baseball cap emblazoned with a fragmented blue-and-orange globe designed by the artist.
The game marked the third and final edition of the Mets “Artist Series” program, where the team ditched the more typical bobblehead giveaways for items created by top contemporary artists. In May, the team released a beach tote bag designed by artist and former art dealer Joel Mesler and, in July, fans received bucket hats designed by Rashid Johnson, who is set for a mid-career survey at the Guggenheim in New York next year.
As Mesler told ARTnews ahead of the season, the project grew out of a trip to the ballpark. Last year, Mets owner Steve Cohen, a top art collector, invited Johnson, Mesler, Jeff Koons, and other artists to watch a game from the executive box. There, the conversation turned to Cohen and his wife Alexandra’s art collection, and to New York as the de-facto capital of the art world. Cohen, Mesler said, came up with the idea of the giveaways, and his daughter Sophie acted as an informal curator.
Sophie Cohen, who has served as an associate director at Gagosian for five years, recently launched Siren Project, an art consultancy working with collectors and artists. While Mesler and Johnson may have gotten the first crack after being present for the idea’s genesis, Cohen told ARTnews this week that she tapped Sze to join after working together at Gagosian, which represents the artist.
“We wanted to focus on New York–based artists for the first year,” Cohen said. “Sarah felt like the perfect artist for it. She represents New York in a beautiful way.”
While Sze’s practice includes painting, drawing, printmaking, and video, she has become best known for her dense assemblages of everyday objects exploring history, technology, globalization, information, interconnection, the internet, and memory. The fragmented globe on the Mets cap appears to echo her 2022 installation at LaGuardia Airport, Shorter than the Day, in which hundreds of photographs of the New York skyline at different times of the day form a sphere.
The cap, like Mesler’s tote and Johnson’s bucket hat, arrived as a collaboration between the artist, Cohen, and the Mets marketing team.
“We’re dealing with giveaways, which the Mets have a specific protocol for. The Mets have their own manufacturers for the giveaways, and there are limits on what they can do. We had to focus on things that can be mass produced and handed out, without them becoming dangerous for the players,” Cohen said.
“From there, we talked with the artists about what has been recieved well, and what we thought would look the best with their work. Then we were just working from sketches and going back and forth to get to the best version.”
As Cohen explained, one of the key attractions for the artists was the opportunity to give back to the New York community. Each artist, rather than taking a commission, chose a charity for the team to donate too. Johnson, for example, picked Brooklyn-based arts nonprofit the Laundromat Project, which funds community-based artistic ventures and local artists.
Steve and Alexandra Cohen are ARTnews Top 200 collectors with a collection spanning world-class works by Willem de Kooning, Andy Warhol, Pablo Picasso, Jasper Johns, Jeff Koons, and Jackson Pollock. The Cohens have said they own works by Johnson.
Now, tens of thousands of Mets fans are art collectors too, thanks to the giveaways.
“A lot of the artists that we are working with are at a price point where it’s very hard to own their work. But the giveaways democratize their work,” Cohen said. “That’s super different than my normal work [at Gagosian and elsewhere]. Getting a piece isn’t about access. It’s just about being one of the first 15,000 people at the game. That’s a beautiful thing and it resonates with the artists a lot.”
