“I love basketball,” says artist Omar Vera. “I got to the point where I couldn’t play enough. I couldn’t get out on the court enough and at a certain point I had to start playing in my head, practicing free throws in my mind. It got to the point of an obsession. I was waking up at six in the morning and going to my neighborhood court and shooting 300 free throws a day whenever I could.”
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When he moved to Chicago from Seattle in 2001 to earn his MFA from the School of the Art Institute, Vera didn’t know where to find a pickup game. So he channeled his passion into a 2002 video and performance piece called The Pascual-Leone Postulate: while a video conveying the visualization of free throws played inside the Art Institute’s Gallery 2–shot from the athlete’s perspective, it shows hands dribbling a ball and sinking basket after basket–Vera shot 200 free throws a day in the gallery’s window. By the end of the 2002 show, he reports, he had reached 88 percent accuracy.
Through sculptures with titles like Shaq Slays the Devil Goat Vera says he’s examining the glorification of athletes and how a hero is created. “They’re kind of these larger-than-life figures, not just physically but in terms of their personalities and their public images, and I wanted to see if I could take that a step further with sculpture through creating these comparisons with classical heroes and even gods.”
