Dear Adam Silver

St. Louis based writer and long time (and first!) friend of the pod Brian Tran is back on the show to discuss his championship winning LA sport teams, the magic of baseball and our concerns and hopes for the election. 

Thank you all for listening! Please share, rate, and leave a review! And vote! 

Lori Powers is a Los Angeles based artist that works with found objects collected from neighborhoods near her home to create characters that she installs on the streets where she momentarily impacts drivers to get out of their heads and into their heart while passing through her neighborhood. A passionate, senior, gold winning basketball player she lives for the day she can get back on the court with her team safely. Her art, like basketball, is a team event. On the court the thrill of receiving a lightning speed blind pass to put in a bucket never gets old. 

Lori is on the pod today to discuss her recent work Survival Hoops made in collaboration with Nico Naismith. The two have created over a hundred basketball hoops out of found objects (a surfboard, a grill, a baby carriage and more) and installed them all over the streets of LA during the pandemic, when park hoops were closed off. The movement of Survival Hoops has now spread all over the world! Huge thank you to vagabond pick up basketball player, brilliant writer and previous podcast guest Isaac Eger for writing a beautiful piece about Lori and Nico's work in the LA Times and for putting me in touch with Lori as a podcast guest.  If anyone is interested in making their own survival hoop and needs help, you can email Lori at [email protected]. And a huge thank you to Lori for coming on the show! 

Here is Isaac Eger's piece in the LA Times and here is the short documentary on Survival Hoops made by a local CBS station in LA. 

A Dear Adam Silver first! Live poetry on the show! Thank you to the writer and poets Cortney Lamar Charleston, Caroline Cabrera and Zain Aslam for coming on the pod to share their poems that were recently featured in Ballerz 2K20, a team of basketball poems edited by P. Scott Cunningham of O, Miami. These three poems are wonderfully rich and add to our collective understanding and narratives around the game of basketball. 

You can buy your own copy of Ballerz 2K20 here!

P. Scott Cunningham is a poet and essayist originally from Boca Raton, FL, now based in Miami.  He is the author of Ya Te Veo ,  selected by Billy Collins for the Miller Williams Poetry Series. Scott is a graduate of Wesleyan University and is the founder and director of O, Miami, a non-profit organization that celebrates Miami, FL through the lens of poetry. I found out about his work because he recently edited a collection of poems all about basketball entitled Ballerz 2K20 . Scott is also a longtime Miami Heat fan which made this podcast even more interesting to record right now! To learn more about O, Miami and the poetry festival they put on every year, please check out omiami.org and follow them on Instagram at @Omiamifestival. The organization is truly dedicated to celebrating Miami and engaging with their community through encounters with poems.

You can find the New Yorker article we reference in the episode about the poetry contest Scott organized in 2010 when Lebron joined the Heat here. 

Born in El Paso, TX, Ivan Salcido is a Mexican-American artist living and working in Portland, OR. He draws on personal experience, family history and an interest in Mesoamerican mythology for inspiration. His practice covers various skills and media, with formal training in fine art, carpentry and metalwork, including sculpture, drawing, and painting and the use of steel, wood and neon. His new work has shifted toward the narrative, while older works were primarily focused on abstract forms and elements subtly rooted in personal experience.

Ivan came on the show to discuss the amazing basketball card he created in honor of his grandmother's playing days back in the 1950's. We also discussed his body of work entitled Creation Myth, where he makes pieces that combine elements from modern day basketball in reference to a similar game played in Mesoamerican culture. 

You can view more of his work here and follow him on instagram @idsalcido. 

H-O-R-S-E, a Comedy by Kathleen Cahill featuring Peter Story and Elisabeth Nunziato. 

Bradley Robert Ward is back on the pod (listen to Episode 21 for our previous conversation about bball and some of his older work!!) to discuss his research and new work about the Negro Leagues and his own relationship with baseball, as a fan, former player and image maker. Our conversation was timely for many reasons, one of them being that the 75th anniversary of Jackie Robinson signing with the Brooklyn Dodgers was just this past Friday, August 28. Bradley and I discussed the failures of MLB to adequately address the systemic racism that exists both in their past and contemporary existence and how this connects to a larger issue within the US, where BIPOC histories are regularly left out of the historical narrative and misremembered, romanticized or forgotten by our mainstream media.  

You can view Bradley's artwork on his website and follow him on Instagram here.  

Thank you to Bookman's for sponsoring this episode of Dear Adam Silver. 

Professor's of Sociology Kyle Green and Alex Manning, at SUNY Brockport and Hamilton College respectively, are back on the pod to discuss the last few days in the world of sports. 

Please keep in mind that this discussion was recorded on the evening of Thursday, August 27.  

You can follow Alex Manning on twitter here for discussion on the crossover between sports and sociology,  and check out Kyle Green's website here. 

Seattle based Art Director Dwayne Mansfield is on the show today to discuss his new and evolving brand Hoops and Horticulture and the concept behind his handmade basketball planters. His dedication to exploring the idea of growth through basketball and plants is at the crux of this work. 

Follow Hoops and Horticulture on Instagram here and please check out his Etsy store and support his work here. The planters are elegant, thoughtfully designed and a must have for any bball fan/plant collector. 

Thank you to Bookman's for sponsoring this episode of Dear Adam Silver. 

Ciara Ingram a Videographer and Editor at SLAM magazine. She focuses on using filmmaking to capture life through the lens of the arts, music, and basketball culture. In this conversation, we discuss her beginnings in basketball, her time playing in college, and how she has used the game in a creative way to launch her career as an artist. 

If you are interested in checking out Ciara's work, including much of the video work we reference in our discussion,  you can find it here. 

Thank you to Ciara for coming on the show!