The art of sports and sports as art.

Two worlds collide and complement each other in an exhibition now traveling the country as the Winter Olympics starts soon.

Senior arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown had a chance to take it all in for our arts and culture series, Canvas.

It's the rare museum exhibition where visitors can get in the game themselves.

And that's the name of an exhibition put together by the San Francisco Museum of Modern

Art and now at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, exploring

the intersection of sports and American life.

Paintings and other traditional art forms, fashion and design. Even sports equipment, fishing rods,

surfboards, bicycles hung on gallery walls like sculptures. One idea here, to bridge a perceived divide between two worlds, one that Crystal

Bridges curator Laura Pratt felt herself. I came into the show thinking, oh, I'm not a sports

person, and then I took a clear. You're not. Well, I thought that I was no sports person. As it turns out,

I think I am. It touches so many parts of people's lives, and this is a

really a way to make that connection and bring them in for closer conversations. There's the spectacle

and effort. Omages to key figures in sports history, such as Althea Gibson, also explorations of

gender and race, as in Deborah Roberts, red, white,

and blue.

And health and violence, CTE brain scans drawn in charcoal by Sean Leonard's.

Jennifer Dunlop Fletcher was one of the San Francisco MoMA co-curators.

Throughout the development of the exhibition, we started to see so many more parallels than we thought possible between sports and art.

Derek Forger has a beautiful painting in the exhibition called Open Swim, and that was really about the limited hours that black citizens had to the public pool, one hour a day versus seven hours a day.

Many of the artists both note a personal connection to sports as well as just seeing a cultural aspect where sports are permeating so many different aspects of contemporary

culture.

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