BMC Allstars + Ball Handling Score

New Craft Artists in Action was founded in 2010 by Maria Molteni and launched with collaborators Andrea Sherrill Evans and Taylor McVay. NCAA is an queer + feminist art collective with shifting international players/members and home-court roots in Massachusetts, where basketball originated. 

Building upon collaborative skill-sharing models- as well as exhibitions, publication and public artworks- the collective incorporates techniques from fibercraft to weaving, painting to performance, bookbinding to screen printing. Like the artists of Black Mountain College they call upon resourceful, innovative techniques to meet needs of community and facilitate creative problem solving in neglected spaces. NCAA projects and programs create interdisciplinary learning environments and bodies of artwork that champion participation over spectatorship as well as a tactile and tactical liberation of play. 

The game of basketball was born in the cradle of a recycled peach basket in 1891. The improvised action of transforming a hand-crafted utilitarian object into a vehicle for a new and influential commons feels deeply connected to the spirit of Black Mountain College. It also inspired the NCAA collective’s first open-sourced project, Net Works, by which makers and players create their own varied and vibrant basketball nets. In 2014 they printed a publication: a knit and crochet instruction manual complete with national-wide artist submissions of patterns, photos and writing. Net Works: Learn to Craft Handmade Basketball Nets for Empty Hoops in your Neighborhood has become a wide-spread teaching tool for artists, educators and organizers across the globe. Molteni, whose personal fiber-based practice grew into a generative teaching model, likens the shift to Josef Albers’ use of Homage to the Square compositions as blueprints for teaching color theory. 

In addition to public court interventions (via both nets and massive painted Cosmic Courts), NCAA members craft elaborate “show nets” for more formal exhibitions. In 2020 they created a body of work called BMC Allstars x NCAA for UNCG Weatherspoon’s “To the Hoop” exhibition. This project included original artworks inspired by the work of previous Black Mountain College affiliates, namely Anni and Josef Albers, Ruth Asaw and John Cage. 

One of these works Yarn Over, Double Dribble: Ball Handling Score became an experimental score adapted from Andrea Sherrill Evans’ basketball net pattern in the Net Works publication. For this work, Molteni translated the gridded pattern of knitting language into a color coded set of instructions for honing a basketball player’s offensive skills. Choreographed exercises, such as dribbling between the legs or passing around the waist, substitute knitting instructions that carry similar fluid dexterity. The piece has been performed for a live audience twice by Molteni, as a musician might read and perform sheet music. Most recently it was performed at ReVIEWING Black Mountain College 15. The full piece also exists as a video artwork now on view in Fuller Craft Museum’s exhibition Maria Molteni: Soft Score. 

Maria Molteni (They/ Them, b. 1983 Nashville, TN) is an interdisciplinary artist, designer, educator, and mystic, based in MA and TN. Their formal training is rooted in painting + printmaking and athletics + dance (trained by a former dancer with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company), but their work has grown to incorporate deep research, experimental education, and social magic. They are an independent scholar of intentional communities and matriarchal societies, specializing in honeybees and the Shaker “Era of Manifestations”. Having laid the foundations for the community-centered basketball court painting movement with their collective New Craft Artists in Action, they playfully position their themself as if a P.E. Coach of visionary movements like Black Mountain College.