Maxwell Pearce is a professional athlete, entrepreneur, and mixed media artist who interrogates how Black athletes and their potential are broadly perceived in pop and visual culture. Originally from Tuckahoe, Westchester County, New York, he demonstrated his love of sports early on: in 2018, he was a semifinalist in the 2018 ESPN College Slam Dunk Championship. Shortly after, he became the first Division III basketball player to be fully featured in two video games (NBA 2K and NBA Live).

In 2020, he was an Honorable Mention nominee for the ‘Can’t Stop Watching Moment of the Year’ ESPYS Award. Currently as a Harlem Globetrotter, his social presence has led to viral videos featured by CNN, GQ, CBS, Bleacher Report, SportsCenter, MTV’s Ridiculousness, and more.

Propelled by a deeply inappropriate live interview with Alabama television anchors in 2020 that he felt had racist undertones, Pearce channeled the extreme backlash and racist messages he received into an artistic celebration of athletes’ abilities to define their own realities beyond their careers in sports. Pearce utilizes his off seasons from the Harlem Globetrotters—with whom he’s played since 2018 — to create mixed media pieces that are both historical and contemporary through inspirations like Wilma Rudolph and Serena Williams. “The Legacy of the Juke Joint” (2022) is a vibrant, imaginative near-replica of Ernie Barnes’ well-known 1976 painting “Sugar Shack.” Each aspect of the hectic club scene is composed of colored shoelaces, which honors the literal ties that connect athletes across generations. The artist’s other works, while few, communally revere the multi-dimensionality of the human spirit through Black athletes as some of its greatest representatives. 

Pearce often reflects his commitment to weaving together the worlds of activism and sports in his hometown of Tuckahoe by increasing local youths’ exposure to basketball as a career early on, strengthening and diversifying the pipeline of players. The artist also ties the socially relevant aspects of his work into his civic engagement efforts, most recently by serving as the PR liaison for local voter registration groups that target Westchester County teenagers. Pearce has created site-specific and other commissioned works for the Reebok Human Rights Awards (2021), a FootLocker site-specific work for CultureCon NYC (2022), and the New Orleans BUKU Art and Music Festival (2022).