The Chicago Bulls are debuting their new home court design for the 2024 Emirates NBA Cup tonight against the Atlanta Hawks. Prior to the game, our friends at the Bulls invited Modern Notoriety to check out the new court firsthand and learn more about its design.
For Year 2 of the NBA Cup, all 30 NBA teams will be playing on fully painted courts designed by artist Victor Solomon. The color of the courts for Group Play and the Quarterfinals contrast the home teams’ Nike NBA Statement Edition uniforms, while a wood-colored court with a bracket design will be used for the Semifinals and Championship games held in Las Vegas.
At the foundation of each court design are three concentric circles that radiate from midcourt, representing the three phases of the tournament: Group Play, Quarterfinals, and the Semifinals/Championship game.
“If you look at it from a certain angle, it almost looks like a spotlight is hitting down on the court,” says Victor Solomon. “I like the idea of almost foreshadowing to the Las Vegas finale and sort of the prize fight aesthetic of that.”
Each court also prominently features the NBA Cup trophy at midcourt and in the lanes, as well as team-specific wordmarks on the baselines. As a final touch, Solomon also created what he calls a “storytelling layer” for each team court to inject some narrative that is unique to each market.
“On top of the concentric circles, there’s a layer of translucent white paint that is specifically at a 30° opacity from pure white, one degree for each of the 30 teams,” Solomon explains. “For each market, I initially designed something that would go on top. For Boston, where I’m from, we did a riff on the parquet floor. Chicago we did just like the big iconic bull head on there.”
These initial concepts by Solomon were presented to each of the team’s creative directors, who were brought in to collaborate on the final design. “Some teams went with what my thought starter was for the storytelling layer. Other teams went in directions that I never could’ve imagined that were super interesting and successful. It’s been really cool now to see them as they start to roll out as the tournament is playing out, how the players are interacting with them, and the fan reaction has been super positive.”
Check out the Chicago Bulls 2024 Emirates NBA Cup court design below and continue scrolling to read more from our interview with Victor Solomon to learn more about the artist.
Interview has been edited for length and clarity
Modern Notoriety: You’ve been able to turn your passion for basketball into a dream career. How was this passion for basketball first form?
Victor Solomon: Growing up in Boston, hockey was a big deal. I was dying to play hockey, but my family didn’t have money for the equipment or the ice time or anything like that. And basketball you could just walk up and start playing. So it was very easy for me to just start picking up the game in that way.
And it was an interesting time, Boston is a very complicated city socially. So I think I was having a little bit of a challenge sort of finding my community as a mixed race person. But on the basketball court it was very clean, because everyone on the court had the same goal in mind. So I kind of accidentally stumbled into this incredible opportunity for building community in that city and it just stuck with me throughout my career, exploring different modes of creativity.
I later moved to San Francisco when I was working as a filmmaker and I was looking for something, basically a hobby to distract myself from how long it takes to get a film made. I wandered into this stained glass store and started apprenticing under those guys for a while to learn that craft and technique. I made a basketball backboard just as a hobby and a way to celebrate the sport that meant something to me. I put it on my personal social and it went a bit viral. A gallery reached out and we showed at Art Basel a few months later, had a couple of shows, that led to the NBA reaching out. Then we started talking about trophies. Nine years later, we do everything. Pretty crazy speedrun version of the journey but that’s how it went down.
Modern Notoriety: What was that first meeting with the NBA like for your first project with them?
Victor Solomon: So I had an art show in New York in 2016 or something and I think a couple of people from the NBA, it just organically got on their radar. They came by and reached out and they just thought what I was doing was cool and interesting, and just wanted to make connections, see it there was potentially something that we can discuss working on together.
My gut went straight towards trophies because I think that trophies have a very interesting and special symbolism of being the representation of getting to the end of the journey which I think is really powerful. And to that point, what they’ve been giving away for most of the trophies was a little bit of an afterthought I thought, and I think basketball players are some of the most interesting, culturally-innovative people that exist in our world. So for the object to represent the finality of their life’s journey to be at a level less than the creative, innovative thinkers that they are, felt like a little disrespectful to their journey.
So my first meeting with the NBA I was like, “What is going on with the trophies?”. At that time, the trophies were so scattered across different groups and different teams that were producing all of the many pieces that they do. The conversation took a long time to sort of get organized, but we started cultivating a relationship, did a couple of art installation pop-ups at All-Star Weekends over the course of time in between.
Then as it came up to the NBA 75th anniversary, that was a nice sort-of peg for us to have a storytelling point to say “Okay, for the first 75 years the trophies were like this, for the next 75 years they’re gonna be like this.” So we used that time to really lock in and redesign everything with a real sort-of holistic vision in mind that all the trophies have a visual relationship to one another. So the 75th anniversary was the unveiling of that, and we’re going into Year 4 of our trophy program now. That’s now expanded into G-League, the WNBA, and a couple more things over there as well.
Modern Notoriety: Now you’re designing courts as well. Was this project more challenging than the previous ones? With 31 court designs, I imagine it was a lengthy process.
Victor Solomon: It’s great because as my relationship with the league has grown, they’ve started to trust me with more and more opportunities. And as they unveiled this concept of an in-season tournament last year, commissioner Adam Silver had an idea that all of the courts would be visually unique so that if you’re at a bar or if you’re out and you look up and you see a game happening, you viscerally would understand “Okay, this is not a regular season game, this is something different, this is something special.”
So I think based on how last year’s iterations of the court went and the reaction that they had from that, they sort-of wanted to push the envelope into this year. So they approached me basically as soon as last year’s in-season tournament was done and asked me if I wanted to be creative director of the NBA Cup and doing all 31 courts, which is obviously a huge honor.
But to your point, very daunting to think about. 30 teams, 30 personalities, 30 points of view. Also too just the historical ramifications of like moments that happen on these courts could be record-breaking moments, historic poster moments, these sorts of things. So it was a really fun challenge to think about it. Think about too, courts are huge. Physically, they’re just gigantic things. So it took some recontextualization to think about the medium of it, but that’s a really fun challenge.
One of the things that I think is consistent with how we like to work on these things, going back to the trophies for a second, when we approached it, that was similarly daunting because it’s like 80-something pieces. We went into that with the vision of each piece having an aesthetic relationship with one another so that there is continuity across all of them. So if you win Player of the Month and then you win MVP, there should be an aesthetic DNA that connects the two just in the spirit of cohesiveness and thoughtfulness to how we approach the collection.
So, I like to think about projects, particularly with these sorts of scale, starting with a system. It can get a little overwhelming if you just go out and say “okay, 30 different things starting from scratch.” So fundamentally I just wanted to start with a system that all of the teams could filter through. And we went through a lot of different iterations, but where we landed on was this concentric circle concept where it’s these three stacked circles that play off the teams core colors. There’s a big learning from last year where courts had some interaction with the City Edition jerseys which didn’t always use the team’s core colors, which was a little jarring for some fanbases. So we just took it down to the team’s core colors with these three graded concentric circles as the foundation for everything.
Modern Notoriety: Talking specifically about the Chicago Bulls court, what was the thought process behind having the Bulls logo as the “storytelling layer”? It’s such an iconic logo, so was it an immediate thought to have it be the star of the show?
Victor Solomon: For sure. I mean league-wide, wherever your fandom lies, you cannot deny the level of icon that the Chicago Bulls logo is. So as we were going through and thinking about these storytelling layers for each team, putting the bull on top of that was a no-brainer. And it looks great and I’m glad that the team was in line with that.
Check out more of Victor Solomon’s work on his Instagram.