On February 10th, Queens College’s Godwin-Ternbach Museum opened a new exhibition–LEGENDS: Athleticism in Asian/American Art. The exhibit, curated by Jayne Cole Southard, an art historian and lecturer at The City College of New York showcases the intersection between sports and art through the works of Asian and Asian American artists.
“LEGENDS examines how artists of Asian descent engage with the shared language of art and sport to reflect identity, nationalism, gender, the body, spectatorship, and performance. This exhibition features artists and collectives across a wide range of artistic media – including painting, installation, fashion, and video – to conceptually illustrate these topics,” stated a January 2026 press release from the museum.
Among other artists, the exhibition will include debut works from The Chinatown Basketball Club (CBC), Astria Suparak, and Kaarina Chu Mackenzie.
The CBC is a weekly gathering consisting of pickup hoops, Saturday indoor runs, and Sunday school workshops. It was founded by Lu Zhang – an artist based in New York – and Herb Tam – the Curator and Director of Exhibition at the Museum of Chinese in America – in 2019. “For us, the basketball court is a home, a studio, a workshop, and a place of belonging,” according to the CBC’s website. Astria Suparak is an artist and curator based in Oakland, California.
In her work, Suparak analyzes “how institutionalized racism, classism, and colonialism are embedded in popular culture, such as in science-fiction movies, rock music, memes, and sports,” states her bio online. For example, The Game is Not the Thing: Sport and the Moving Image – curated by Astria Suparak and Brett Kashmere – is a film series that highlights how sports and art overlap through sports film.
Kaarina Chu Mackenzie is a Taiwanese American painter and photographer based in Woodstock, New York. Mackenzie’s paintings are often inspired by her photography and her desire for more Asian representation in traditional fine arts. In her exhibit, The Night Market – her solo show that ran in 2023 – Mackenzie shows the beauty and chaos of the night market through multiple paintings and photographs.
LEGENDS is funded by the Thomas Chen Family/Crystal Windows Endowment. In 2021, the Thomas Chen family/Crystal Windows Endowment provided $1.1 million to “support Asian contemporary art at the college through exhibitions, student scholarships, and a visiting artist program,” according to a CUNY press release from November 10th, 2021. The LEGENDS: Athleticism in Asian/American Art exhibition will be on view at the Godwin-Ternbach Museum – located in Klapper Hall – until May 14th, 2026. The museum is open from 10am to 4pm, Monday through Thursday, and offers events with exhibition curator Jayne Cole Southard. You can find dates for those events here.
