Students Turn Basketball Courts Into Beautiful Art

A group of urban design and architecture students have transformed the basketball courts at Alexander Street Park into vibrant street murals in a partnership with the Charlotte Urban Design Center, an office in the City of Charlotte’s Planning, Design, and Development department. The student group, representing Master of Urban Design (MUD) students and students in the UNC Charlotte chapter of Freedom By Design, were led by Professor Deb Ryan.

The basketball street mural project was to originally have been a temporary “tactical urbanism” project on Tryon Street during the Charlotte Shout Festival. When that festival was cancelled due to COVID concerns, the Charlotte Urban Design Center worked with Mecklenburg County Park and Rec to choose an alternative location, said Charlotte Lamb ’18, a graduate of UNC Charlotte’s Master of Urban Design program and an associate urban design and planner with the city. “Alexander Street Park rose to the top, due to the age of the courts and the proximity to Seigle Point, a mixed-income neighborhood with a rich history for students to dive into,” Lamb said.

After weeks of planning and designing in Ryan’s fall studio, the 12 MUD students were joined the first weekend of November by nearly 30 additional student volunteers to paint the courts. “We had kids from the neighborhood playing on the court before we had even finished packing up our supplies!” Lamb said.

The project was funded by Charlotte Urban Design Center as part of its creative placemaking program, which Lamb said, transforms underutilized public spaces “through city-led projects or by providing Charlotteans with the resources needed to meet their community’s public space goals through their own placemaking project.”

Rather than paint, the team used a special concrete stain so that the color soaked into the pavement. “This will keep the artwork from chipping off and should hold up against general foot traffic and game play for years to come,” Lamb said.

The team also installed small nets at different heights within the park pavilion to allow children of various ages to play ball. And a sidewalk mural encourages visitors to “take a selfie” before shooting hoops.

MUD student Jessie Cart described the students’ design as reflecting “history, connection, and inspiration.”

“Through our design, we aimed to touch on the history of basketball in Charlotte while connecting to the history of the Belmont neighborhood and the future of the area. We also wanted to connect the park to rest of Charlotte. Its proximity to the Cross Charlotte Trail allows for a wider breadth of interaction, and with Charlotte’s growing mural community, a ground mural was an excellent option! Our final design driver was to inspire. We hoped that our mural installation could serve as a living example of how spaces can be transformed in short amounts of time.”

The park’s two courts represent the past (the black and white design) and the future (full color), and each contains a hand tossing a basketball, which extends beyond the court into the grass, defined by mulch and landscaping.

“Basketball is a sport of hands and feet,” Cart said. “There is a lot of teamwork and passing that goes on within the game. Hands have also historically symbolized things such as hospitality, generosity, and protection. From an aerial perspective, one can see that a ball is being passed from the Black and White Court to the Color Court – a passing from the past to the future.”