Volume 27 · Number 2 · Winter 2010
Sports
The art of athletes
Some student-athletes are equally at home in the galleryor on the stage as they are in the locker room.
by Amanda Piechowski
Brandon Tucker adjusts his pads and helmet before jogging onto the football field. Hannah Stephens tightens the laces on her sneakers before stepping onto the basketball court. Jazz Trice does one final stretch before taking his mark on the track. Every day, these three UC Davis student-athletes spend hours sprinting, lifting, sweating and living the life of a Division I competitor.
Just as often, Tucker puts a paintbrush to canvas to create a landscape scene. Stephens selects charcoal and a drawing pad and sketches the images that come to her mind. And Trice picks up a script to memorize lines for the next play in which he’ll appear.
Downtown Davis by Brandon Tucker (football).
Every day these student-athletes are also artists — equally devoted to the easel, sketchpad and stage as they are to the field, court and track. They say their dual passions of sports and art complement rather than contradict one other.
At UC Davis, they are not alone. More than 20 Aggie athletes, representing 12 teams, exhibited their artwork in an inaugural show, The Art of Athletes, in downtown Davis this fall.
“When people find out that I’m an art major, they’re a little more surprised,” Stephens said. “You just think of Division I athletes as devoted to their sport, and that’s how they’re characterized or personified. I think it makes people realize that there is so much more to everyone than just being a basketball player at Davis or a football player.”
The Art of Athletes exhibit was co-organized by Tucker, a senior art studio major and a running back on the football team. Though injured for the 2009 season, Tucker has been a major contributor for the Aggies, leading the team in touchdowns in 2008 after being selected to the All-Great West Conference second team in 2007.
He has played football most of his life, starting with flag football at age 5 and moving through the ranks of Pop Warner, high school and four years on the UC Davis team.
Tucker said art also has been part of his life for as long as he can remember. “My dad does a lot of silk screening and he had an interest in art when he was in high school and took art classes,” Tucker said. “He’d always be drawing or designing shirts or making banners for us when we played, so it was one of those creative minds that was passed down to me.”
Tucker said he discovered art as his calling when he was in his senior year at Woodrow Wilson High School in Los Angeles. That’s when he was accepted into Ryman Arts, a prestigious, free month-long program held Saturdays at the University of Southern California Roski School of Fine Arts for young artists from throughout Southern California.
“I had never had a technical art class so that was my first experience and that’s what drew me into taking classes here,” Tucker said.
During the summer of his junior year at UC Davis, Tucker traveled to Italy through a campus study-abroad program and spent three weeks in the countryside painting and another week in Rome. He then chose to stay an extra few days to travel to Venice.
After graduating in 2010, Tucker would like to pursue a Master of Fine Arts, with plans to teach art, create his own work and give back to the community. His experiences in organizing The Art of Athletes exhibit has him dreaming of one day putting together a youth art/sports club.
“A lot of people grow up and they feel that they can’t do art, and I want to show them that it’s not hard,” he said.
Top, Spinning Basketball
by Hannah Stephens
(women’s basketball).
Center, Jazz Trice acting as Backwards Soldier in the show #5 Angry Red Drum.
Bottom, Two Faced by Brittney O’Brien (women’s rowing)
Tucker said that, even as his athletic abilities fade, his art can be a lifelong pursuit. “I can always come back to art,” he said. “That’s something I can never lose. If there was something that kept me from painting, I don’t know other ways to see life.”
Like Tucker, Stephens was surrounded by art from an early age. Her mother is a special education teacher in Stephens’ hometown of San Mateo and was always working on different arts and crafts projects.
Stephens never took art classes while attending Archbishop Mitty High School, though immediately signed up once she transferred to UC Davis from the University of Utah.
Stephens has been playing basketball since the third grade, and the game remains her No. 1 love. But she says that could change as she pursues her art studio major.
As a transfer student, Stephens said the The Art of Athletes exhibit helped connect her with other student-athletes, as well as with other art majors like Tucker who shared insights on classes and professors.
Stephens, who is exploring career options in art therapy, art history and other art fields, said she finds drawing provides some relief from the pressures of both her coursework and the court. “It’s nice to sit down and work on something that is just [for] yourself,” she said.
Trice, who holds the UC Davis record in the 110-meter high hurdles, said he started acting for similar reasons. “It was a really great way to get away from [stress] and relax, and then it just got to be something I became really passionate about,” he said. “I wanted to learn as much as I could about all aspects of theatre. And now it’s my major, and I love it so much.”
His double major in dramatic art and psychology was a big switch from his initial plans — he started his freshman year on a pre-med track. But after performing his sophomore year in a campus production of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, he knew he was hooked on theatre. Since then, he has also performed on campus in the Philip Kan Gotanda play #5 The Angry Red Drum and Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale. Trice was assistant director for the musical Oklahoma last spring and has written a piece for the THIRDeYE Theatre Festival, which features original plays written, produced and performed by UC Davis students.
Now a senior, Trice is applying to graduate psychology programs to become a clinical pyschologist, with hopes of eventually attending medical school and becoming a psychiatrist, but he said he plans to keep acting and writing. He also hopes to continue competing in track as long as it doesn’t interfere with getting his career off the ground.
He began track and field in middle school as a sprinter, but turned his focus to hurdling at the advice of his coach at Chaparral High School in Southern California. In addition to setting his UC Davis record, Trice won last year’s Big West Conference championship and advanced to the NCAA Championships.
All three students say their art helps them in sports, and vice versa.
Learning about visual expression through his painting, Tucker said, has improved his ability to communicate nonverbally on the football field. Stephens says drawing has given her a better understanding of the importance of precision on the basketball court, where an inaccurate pass or out-of-place body position can ruin a carefully drawn play. Trice credits his theatre training for helping him express himself better to coaches and teammates, and his athletic conditioning with honing his body for physically demanding dramatic roles.
“It’s really important for people to understand that athletes are multifaceted individuals,” Trice said. “We come to college to get a degree and learn everything that we can, and being an athlete essentially comes second. And there’s so much about us that people don’t know.”
View an online slideshow of the Art of the Athlete exhibition