Maxwell Pearce

      Maxwell Pearce is a player-ambassador for the Harlem Globetrotters and a mixed media artist from Tuckahoe, NY who interrogates how athletes are perceived in pop and visual culture. He demonstrated his love of sports early on while picking up five total sports by the time he was out of high school - tennis, basketball, football, baseball, and cross country. In the midst of playing sports throughout his childhood, he was always focused on his ability to define reality beyond life in sports. In the third grade, he developed a strong passion for the Arts that began with designing the yearbook cover for his elementary school.
              After graduating high school, he was a starting point guard at Purchase College, where he quickly built a global reputation for his slam dunk videos. His social presence led to being featured in CNN, GQ, CBS, Sportscenter, MTV, and more. In 2018, he won the first ever shark tank business competition at Purchase College with his idea for a nonprofit called Flynance, a program that he founded with a teammate from Purchase. This program aims to help student athletes with the transition from sports into their next phase of life. This program was named a 2018 Westchester Up & Coming Award recipient, and was featured in Westchester Magazine. That same year, he represented Purchase College in the ESPN College Slam Dunk Championship in San Antonio and came in 3rd place. Pearce became just the 7th Division III player to participate in the championship. His outstanding performance led to being discovered by the Harlem Globetrotters and signing a contract upon graduating with a bachelors degree in economics.
              After experiencing a deeply inappropriate live interview with Alabama television anchors that had racist undertones, Pearce channeled the extreme backlash and racist messages he received into an artistic celebration of athletes. His artwork communally reveres the multi-dimensionality of the human under the jersey through Black athletes as some of its greatest representatives. Maxwell reflects his commitment to weaving together the worlds of activism and sports in his hometown by increasing local youths’ exposure to passions beyond sports.
            Maxwell Pearce’s vibrant, textured mixed media works explores the multitudes within athleticism and celebrates athletes’ individual ability to do more than dribble, shoot, and score. His mixed media sculptures—each of which offers multiple points of view—maintain historical and contemporary references through inspirations like Wilma Rudolph and Serena Williams while also transporting audiences through space and time to a specific cultural moment of each athlete. Further, Pearce intends for his works to act as form of social practices engaging society to reflect on meaning, material, and movement. Believing that athletes have a responsibility to acknowledge the societal issues that impact them as HUMANS, Pearce’s works also aim to encourage athletes to be vocal about their beliefs without fear of retaliation or backlash.