For 15 years, Najja Moon avoided basketball. The Miami-based artist and cultural practitioner, assumed life after college demanded practicality rather than an ongoing practice of basketball and art. By finding her community in non-traditional spaces, Moon is now making work that fulfills her two greatest passions. Her merger of art and basketball has even taken on a spiritual and community-based practice built from a desire to connect her past to her present. On the eve of opening her mural court titled Uncommon Routes at Legion Park in Miami, FL, Moon admits her journey back to basketball was itself uncommon.
“I got here as someone who the only thing they ever wanted to do was play basketball,” she says.
Now, approaching 38, art has brought Moon back to basketball. Her exploration of concepts like living life as practice—a lifestyle born from her “Aesthetics of Mobility” project with GeoVanna Gonzalez from 2020—and directional drawings played influential roles. Although she’s not pretending that putting on a little pandemic weight didn’t play a role too. “I want to look in the mirror and feel hot again,” she admits with a laugh. But as Moon, a queer Black woman, added a shooting workout to her weight training she says it quickly became deeper than that. She played half-court threes. Then full court fives. Now she has her own women’s run, which she’s cleverly bonded to her art practice.
“The way I was able to connect with a community of folks that love the game like me again,” she says. “The way it helped me understand my marketing [work] and my art practice better, were all things I hadn’t planned for or anticipated when I decided I had to get in the gym.”
Moon emphasized finding basketball again because as a teenager raised in Durham, North Carolina, she played organized ball and even invented plays as sketches in her notebook. She fantasized about her teammates running her plays. She played Division II ball at Pfeiffer University where she became one of four students to receive the school’s inaugural art degree. Like most college athletes, Moon had to think about life after basketball. Being in a village outside Charlotte was not attracting WNBA scouts, nor was it offering connections to art institutions. Looking back she knows the circumstances were instrumental in her uncommon journey, even if it led to an abandonment of basketball for 15 years.
“When I didn’t have to do two-a-days anymore… I did not,” she says. Her avoidance reflected a loss of love. The rigor of a college athlete had damaged her relationship. Her life after basketball started with a move to Miami, Florida in 2009.
She focused on commercial work in films and advertising, crafting her own circuitous, yet creative lane. Designing marketing collateral led to an aesthetic discovery that emphasized instructional movement with lines, curvature, and arrows. The designs felt like an extension of her playbook inventions. She describes the process and practice as Memory Work; her lines of movement tell a story from her past, even if the viewer may never be able to fully interpret her memory. Often viewers told Moon their interpretations. She took note of references to John Cage’s sheet music and dance choreography notation.
Najja Moon, “Untitled”
“I started to understand [my aesthetic] as a bigger extension of my experience as an athlete, as a kid who has musicians as parents,” she says. “And so I started to widen the way I thought about making things.”
One step in that extension was Najja Moon’s living life as practice concept. It’s a recognition that the idea of “off the clock” is a capitalistic paradigm that can be ignored. For Moon, all waking life is on the clock.
The concept took shape in 2020 with her collaborative Aesthetics of Mobility project with then-partner and artist GeoVanna Gonzalez. By building a tiny home inside a moving truck, their project explored a liberated lifestyle from a housing system that drains both financial flexibility and personal time. The project asked: How would that change their habits and well-being? Moon remains aesthetically mobile, uncommonly off-the-grid still. She bought a new van and designed the interior to include the essentials to a lifestyle with little separation between art and home life.
“I just feel like if going to the gym is part of my art practice and helps me take better care of my body and is an opportunity for me to hang out with my friends, why is that not amazing?” she asks. “Why can’t all the things in my life be like that? I live in my van. It is my living space. It is an architectural sculptural object, if you will. And it helps me get to where I’m going. That is a mark of success for me. If I can do multiple things at once.”
Striving for multiplicity has defined Moon’s practice. An ink on paper drawing becomes a pebble in a pond. The tide ripples represent sound recordings, choreography, and short films. Take Moon’s “Corners and Alleyways are Landmarks too i” and “There is no separation attempt 1-4” drawings for example. Both are built from Memory Work; the lines are personal and narrate memories both on and off the court. But, when her directional strokes were interpreted as resembling notations and instructions, she expanded her drawings into actual choreography and hymnal sheet music. Moon filmed friends performing the basketball choreography and enlisted musicians to play the hymns as the score, which she turned into a short film called The Huddle Is A Prayer Circle. Her childhood dream of getting her friends to execute her invented plays came true.
“I was thinking about this place of worship and how the pulpit is almost like a stage where this person performs and inspires people,” she says. “It has the same energy that you get in an arena.”
Still from Moon’s The Huddle Is A Prayer Circle film
The Huddle Is A Prayer Circle is one of two ongoing, directly basketball-influenced works in Najja Moon’s body of work. The other is her parafictional WNBA team The Miami Vis. Both projects inquire into Moon’s idea of basketball as a faith-based practice. With Prayer Circle, she conjures memories of Durham to build a world in which the pulpit in a baptist church—where her mother is a minister—and Duke’s Cameron Indoor Stadium are one in the same.
“I think about these moments in church where people come up to the front and hold hands and ask if there are any prayer requests. So much of the choreography of that experience mimics [basketball] after they introduce the starting five, everybody coming back together in a circle, and the coach giving his sermon, if you will. I think the goals of that prayer in church and that pregame speech are the same. To inspire. To motivate confidence.”
As she waits on finishing touches for The Huddle Is A Prayer Circle before its public debut, Moon remains active in building more basketball worlds. While studying the painter Ernie Barne, a fellow Durham native, she noticed similarities between his elongated forms and the gestures in her mark making. She wondered “is there something about being from this place where music and faith and sport intersect that we kinda stretch things this way?” The result is Moon’s logo for her parafictional WNBA team The Miami Vis. After creating the team branding, Moon wanted the Vis to actually exist beyond her imagination.
“I was like what would it look like to build a basketball organization for adults that still take this shit seriously, that love to hoop, but also have a life?”, she says.
At its core, its a pick-up group for women seeking adult cardio, maybe hit a happy hour together, and stay bonded to a basketball community. On the parafictional side, all participants have an organizational role with the Vis. Her current partner, marketing professional Jaki Goldner, is team CEO. Much like a WNBA franchise, they have rec players from a men’s league that they scrimmage and refer to as their “practice squad.” A chance encounter with Andre Drummond, who trained in Miami in the off-season, led to him agreeing to be their parafictional head coach last summer. Moon even has an ex-WNBA player on the team; Matee Ajavon. This past WNBA All-Star Weekend several of the Vis traveled to Phoenix, AZ where they played womens’ pick-up group the Phoenix Queer Hoopers at an event the teams dubbed The Hungover Classic. The courtside coolers were filled with Gatorade and champagne bottles.
Set to open December 9, theUncommon Routes basketball court is Moon’s largest—in physical scale—project to date. The title for the mural court came from researching Miami Heat All-Star Jimmy Butler. His noteworthy journey from community college to mid-major at Marquette University to drafted 30th in the 2011 NBA Draft to one of the most recognized faces and a perennial postseason threat in the league resonated with Moon. Made in partnership with non-profit Project Backboard, donut shop The Salty, and Butler’s BIGFACE Coffee, a brand that embraces the term uncommon as a testament to Butler’s unconventional path and personality, Moon’s court leaned into the uncommon idea knowing she could describe her own route to becoming a full-time artist as “weird,” i.e. untypical.
Moon doesn’t want to sound woo woo about speaking things into existence, but the last few years of merging basketball with art and the energy she’s experienced around world-building on those ideas has warmed her to the notion. When asked if she feels her imaginative world building has shifted into community building, she pushes back.
“For me, maybe those are similar,” she says. “When I think about world-building, it is a real world. How can you imagine alternatives that feel more open to myself and others, that feel more free, less restrictive? I think as bleak and scary as it can seem outside right now, it’s important that our imagination is allowing us to construct other possibilities.”
Stay locked in with Najja Moon on her Instagram. Special thanks to Project Backboard and Common Practice for supporting this work.