This Week's Voting Begins Today: Card Artists Raising Awareness about Josh Gibson and the MLB MVP Award!

 

My entry for the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum's Card Art Challenge honoring Josh Gibson.
You can vote for your favorites at www.nlbmart.com, starting at 3 pm Easternon Friday, June 25th.

When I started making card paintings last December, I had several motivations: to make manifest the link between baseball cards, one of the most visible forms of sports memorabilia that we have, and the art and design that make them possible; to create something new using old cards that I had stored away in shoeboxes; and to create during a time that creativity seemed in short supply. 

The paintings grew out of some research that I started to do last summer, spurred initially by Topps's wonderful Project 2020 series of artistic interpretations of classic cards and a meeting that SABR's Baseball Cards Research Committee held. That first conversation with Jason Schwartz, Scott Hodges, Nick Vossbrink, and others opened by eyes about the possibilities of bringing new artistic dimensions to these little two by three inch pieces of cardboard.

I didn't have any specific notions of supporting causes that I believed in, though there may have been some notion that I didn't think about very much yet that I could become part of something that was at least a little bigger than myself.

It's not overstating my honor-one of the biggest of my life-to have been asked by Jason to contribute a card to the Negro League Baseball Museum's Baseball Card Art Challenge, building awareness for the effort to rename the Major League Baseball MVP awards for the great Josh Gibson, the legendary catcher for the Pittsburgh Crawfords and my hometown Homestead Grays.

This is the backstory: In 2020, the Baseball Writers Association of America (BWAA) took the name of Kenesaw Mountain Landis off of the MVP trophy. Judge Landis was the first commissioner of Major League Baseball, taking office in 1920 after the Black Sox scandal and remaining until his death about twenty years later. He was so focused on maintaining stability after the disastrous finding that Chicago White Sox players had bet against themselves during the 1919 World Series that he (at best) avoided integrating the game. The first Black player of the modern era may have taken the field under a different commissioner, as did with Happy Chandler in 1947.

In this monumental year - a year more trying than any in memory, when we have been called to understand what it truly means to be anti-racist and to participate fully in the struggle to draw the United States to fully realize its aspirations, to be a part of an initiative that draws on the creativity of more than fifty artists interpreting Josh Gibson through painting, drawing, design, digital media, found objects, paintings, constructed cards, and even leather is a project that I could not have dreamed participating in when I started.

Bob Johnson's 1965 Topps Orioles card, the subject of a collaboration with Jason Schwartz (@heavyj28) that led me to the Josh Gibson project. 

Jason and I did a collaboration on a 1965 Bob Johnson Topps card, and when he sent it to me he also enclosed three Josh Gibson cards and an invitation to contribute to the Baseball Card Art Challenge. I painted all three, and the Upper Deck card at the top of this post was the one that he thought would best fit as an entry: so here we are.

The three cards that I painted; the one on the upper left was "the one".

I'm in such good company here: not only Jason and Scott have contributed amazing work, but I've had my name in the same space as some other incredible artists: Josee Tellier, Donna Muscarella, and Ray Bailey, just to name a few.

Today, you can vote for my card (and nine others released this week, including Donna and Scott's entries), at the Negro League Baseball Museum's art page, choosing your top three favorites to win the week and go on to the final contest to including each week's winner. The voting for this week's cards opens at 3 pm Eastern time today, June 25th.

My card, which was profiled as number 47 in the series. From Friday, June 25th, through Monday, June 29th, you can vote for it on the project page at www.nlbmart.com. 

Each of these artists (including myself) are active on Twitter and Instagram. Please share our work as widely as you can, and encourage your friends to check out the site and vote too. You can also use the hashtag #JG20MVP to show your support for the effort. Regardless of the result, it's such a thrill to be a part of this initiative and I hope to add more stars of the newly-elevated Negro Leagues to my card painting galleries.