Maria Molteni grew up playing basketball. “I think I’ve always felt really close to the process of shooting free throws,” Molteni says. “Any kind of meditative task is opening your brain up to that kind of therapeutic. …. If you access the presence in your body, you could say it gets you access to healthy brain waves, you could say it gives you access to other realms.”
Molteni says, “I think that’s where you get free because you’re reclaiming your own brain.”
Molteni’s exhibition “Soft Score”—on view at the Fuller Craft Museum in Brockton, Massachusetts, from Jan. 13, 2024, to Jan. 5, 2025—shows how the Boston artist operates at the intersection of sports and art and craft and spirituality and mysticism. The exhibition showcases hand-made basketball nets, custom-designed basketballs, an oscellating fan that blows five white pompoms mounted on the wall, documentation of murals painted on public basketball courts, and a mural painted on the museum wall that seems to be looking down through clouds—outlined by curving metal basketball hoop rims welded together—down to one of their basketball court murals.
Growing up in Nashville, Molteni began playing organized basketball at age 7, and played for 10 years. “I played a bunch of sports,” Molteni recalls. “That was just a huge part of my identity.”
Molteni’s mom’s side of the family was Scotch Irish farmers, Molteni’s dad’s side was Italian. Growing up Roman Catholic, Molteni felt on the edges of the local Protestant majority with the Catholic Irish-Americans, the Italian-Americans, and the Latino-Americans.
“I ended up choosing to go to an all girls high school because I used to get in fights with boys on the playground.” Both of Molteni’s parents were coaches. Molteni was impressed by the nuns playing basketball. When asked what Molteni wanted to be when they grew up, Molteni would say, “a pro basketball player, an artist, and a saint.”
“I don’t identify as traditionally Catholic,” Molteni says. “I always say Catholicism is the gateway to witchcraft. I took that route.”
Molteni studied painting at Boston University—self-portraits, people posing, painting from observation. It felt like an internal project, working alone in their basement studio. After graduating in 2006, Molteni began making friends among students at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts (now part of Tufts University) and found performance art and social practice art.
Molteni felt a need to be more out in the community, so they began painting portraits of houses in their Allston neighborhood. And Molteni began learning to knit—which had a familiar feeling, which Molteni connected to basketball.
“The first basketball stuff I ever made was about the rosary,” a Catholic prayer cycle guided by a necklace of beads. “I practice a body-based mysticism. Even the rosary itself is a tactile type of prayer.”
“Raised a religious person, I was thinking about serving my community,” Molteni says. Molteni began knitting, crocheting and macraméing nets for basketball hoops—nets of roughly regulation size and nets that dangled down low from the hoop, in oranges and reds and purples and pinks and fluorescent greens. And around 2008 or 2009, Molteni began doing performances “praying the rosary and shooting free throws … because that’s what I did as a kid.”
“Yarn Over, Double Dribble: Ball Handling Score” is a video projected on a museum wall of Molteni dribbling and passing a basketball around their body and between their legs in a classic ball-handling practice—the moves derived from pattern for hand-knitting basketball nets created by Andrea Sherrill Evans, and included in their publication “Net Works: Learn to Craft Handmade Basketball Nets from Empty Hoops in Your Neighborhood.”
“You find ways to reclaim some of these practices for yourself,” Molteni says.
The performances, “They were like ceremonies, ritualistic,” Molteni says, including candles and wearing gold clothes and sneakers. The performances evoked the “stomp clap rhythms” of basketball practices and cheers from their playing days, “Repetitive, rhythmic, meditative practices.” The focus and rhythm in the neighborhood of “inducing trance.”
Spirituality and sports, “It’s always been kind of inate in my mind,” Molteni says. “People show up to sporting events to find trance. That’s wonderful, that’s what’s great about it. But it’s all tied up in the market.”
“It connects the mind to the body. Generally in the U.S. or Christian Westerners, the dominant ideology tries to separate the mind from the body, that’s also part of patriarchy, shaming the body, shaming women.”
Molteni felt themself trying to undo and become liberated from Puritan shame. “If I make things that are exciting to me, it really affects people.”
Molteni moved into collaboration with an exhibition that reimagined MEME Gallery in Cambridge as a sort of tiny basketball court in 2011, inviting a couple people to teach people how to knit basketball nets. The collaboration evolved into New Craft Artisans in Action—or NCAA—a pun on the college sports league the National Collegiate Athletics Association.
“We wanted it to be more of an open source, do this for your own neighborhood, make it reflect your own aesthetics and values,” Molteni says of their NCAA. Making nets was useful, a gift to games on public courts, where nets often go missing. Players would use them and making nets seemed a way for folks who aren’t sporty to be involved. “The net is a public piece of fiber art that has its own lifecycle.”
Molteni personalized Molten brand basketballs by hand-letting an “I” on the end to make them into “Molteni” balls. The exhibition includes basketballs manufactured to Molteni’s custom designs. “I’d always wanted to do a court,” to paint a mural on a public basketball court floor. “I’d mention it to people, but people didn’t get it. … I want to do the nets and uniforms and courts. … Not in a commercial way, in a dreamy, surreal way, what some people would call utopian. … I wanted to reinvent the game.”
As an aside, “I have a bit of a bone to pick with utopian right now, so I’d rather talk about it in a dreamy way.” The issue is “utopia is the perfect world that doesn’t exist.” So let’s call it a desire to make a better world.
Molteni began painting murals on basketball courts around 2016, increasingly operating as a “creative director” leading kids and crews of artists—friends, queer folks.
Athletics, Molteni says, was one of the ways “I was able to find my own queerness.”
Identity, accessibility, shared values. “Queer always has a little bit of political world-building too. … When we talk about queer, we’re talking about deprogramming certain constructs and building a new world.”
“The context and community I’m working in is very queer,” Molteni says.
“I was not very prepared for the splash that this kind of work was going to make,” Molteni says of the basketball court murals. Molteni didn’t think to monetize their advice. Corporate athletic ware companies funded basketball court murals. Molteni says, “Some just stole my work.”
“As the basketball court thing started exploding in general,” Molteni thought, “Maybe now I can get more weird.” Painting a basketball court in Salem’s Point neighborhood in 2018, kids suggested a witch theme. Molteni proposed they reinvent the witch, and turned the free throw line into a mystical third eye.
For a New Bedford court in 2019, community members suggested a whale theme. Molteni figured out how to write messages using nautical flag motifs. Molteni wondered, “What do whales want to say to the sky?”
Molteni painted “Gateway to Infinity (An Anti-monument),” a mystical, 40-foot-wide mural of spirals within a circle on the ground along Boston’s Greenway, between Christopher Columbus Park and Faneuil Hall, in 2023.
Molteni began thinking of the basketball courts as “horizontal monuments,” as “altars to the sky.” Molteni says, “I began incorporating astrological imagery. … I now do what I consider spells that I activate. … If there are spells on the court they are always spells for social harmony.”
Molteni often leads art workshops with kids, asking them, “What’s your dream mascot?” Among the challenges of making basketball the locus of a better world is that basketball is generally “all kinds of competitive and it’s all corporate.” Molteni aspires to reconnect people to faith without the commercial institutions in the way. On basketball courts, Molteni sees “possibilities, the infinite expression of joy and gender, if you want, and values.”
“The liberation of recreation,” Molteni says. “Participation over spectatorship.”
“What I need it to do is deprogram children—their allegiance to brands and even teams. I want to deprogram the way they have to chase art or sports, chase to be a girl or a boy, behave like a girl or a boy. I think there’s a place for public art that honors individuals who are great. One of the reasons I started calling courts horizontal monuments is I don’t like monuments.”
“I think we’re programmed to put humans on a pedestal and worship them,” then rip them down for their flaws, “and lose faith for humanity. We should look inside ourselves and see the hero and the divine and the better world in relationships.”
Previously: 2018: Maria Molteni Brings Art, Feminism And A Witch To The Basketball Court With Her New Salem Mural
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