Britt Salvesen
Britt Salvesen is an American curator and writer specializing in photography, prints, and drawings. She is Curator and Department Head of the Wallis Annenberg Photography Department and Prints and Drawings at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where she has organized exhibitions including New Topographics, Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Medium, 3D: Double Vision, and Digital Witness.
Sport Does Not Just Reflect Society; It Helps Shape It
Tom Farrey of the Aspen Institute and LACMA curator Britt Salvesen argue that sport and art are not separate cultural pursuits but ways of seeing how power, belonging and freedom operate in society. Farrey contends that sport has helped shape social change rather than merely reflecting it, while Salvesen says art makes the bodies, communities and emotions behind sport visible. Their Why We Play project asks what games and their representations reveal about the conditions in which people play, watch and belong.
Sport’s Power Depends on Credible Rules, Access, and Responsibility
At the Rose Bowl Institute’s Sportsmanship Summit, Aspen Institute leaders and sports executives argued that sport shapes power not automatically but through the rules, access and relationships institutions build around competition. Dan Reed of the Aspen Institute said leagues depend on legitimate governance and fair enforcement, while Scarlen Martinez argued that athletes and other sports figures must recognize the influence their platforms give them. Across examples from women’s and para sport to the Los Angeles Chargers’ work in Greece, the panel made the case that sport’s civic value rests on how people choose to use that influence.
Belonging in Sport Requires Shared Authority, Not Just Access
At an Aspen Institute roundtable on sport and belonging, sociologist Jay Coakley argued that inclusion requires more than being welcomed: people must be seen, valued and included in decision-making. Participants including Binta Brown, Brandon Bailey, Ezra Frech and Sue Enquist made related cases for sport as a route to agency, representation and social change, while warning that access without shared authority or institutional accountability leaves belonging incomplete.
The Athlete-Artist Divide Narrows Youth Development Too Early
LJ Rader, founder of Art But Make It Sports, argues that children are pushed too early to choose between identities such as athlete and artist, and lose developmental range in the process. In a conversation moderated by LACMA curator Britt Salvesen, Rader uses his art-and-sports image pairings to make the case that both fields train attention, emotion, improvisation and tolerance for beginnerhood. Their shared point is practical rather than romantic: young people benefit when they are allowed to keep playing across more than one kind of practice.