Baseball Time Machines, Grand Magazine

GRAND Magazine devoted five pages to Sean Kane, an artist in Guelph, Ontario who paints portraits of ballplayers onto vintage gloves sourced from the era each man actually played in. Pendulum appears in the story as one of his collectors.

The piece describes Jonathan O’Neil Cole as an African American architect from Kansas City whose firm had designed 26 minor league baseball stadiums by then. He had bought two of Kane’s pieces and was considering a third.

The commission that mattered was Buck O’Neil, the Kansas City Monarchs player who became the first African American coach in the major leagues. Cole wanted the man’s quiet presence carried in the portrait rather than his statistics. “Sean curated my thoughts,” he told the magazine, and went on to describe the collaboration the way a designer would: an artist with a specific focus, listening first. Kane’s paintings have been exhibited at the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City, whose president, Bob Kendrick, appears in the same passage. Pendulum’s own work on that history is the Buck O’Neil Education Center.

The craft detail in the article is worth keeping. Paint cannot be removed from leather, so nothing is improvised: Kane researches the player, builds the design on a computer, then hand paints every element, typefaces and banners and flags included. A finished glove takes sixty to a hundred and twenty hours.

Source: “Baseball time machines” by Charlotte Prong Parkhill, photography by Mathew McCarthy, GRAND Magazine, March / April 2019, pages 90 to 94.

The framework Pendulum uses to judge a venue as a long term civic and financial system is set out in S.C.O.R.E.