Jonas Wood, the Boston-born and Los Angeles-based contemporary artist, is best known for his paintings and drawings, which vary from portraits to landscapes to still lifes. His work has been exhibited all around the world, including in the L.A. area, at the Hammer Museum, the Broad and the Museum of Contemporary Art. But his latest L.A. showcase was unlike any before it: on the hardwood and jerseys of one of the city’s two NBA basketball teams, the Clippers — or, to use the nickname that Wood’s work has helped to popularize, the “Clips.”
It all began three years ago when a friend of Wood’s, an L.A. realtor and entrepreneur, was chatting with the Clippers’ president of business operations, Gillian Zucker. Zucker mentioned that the team wanted to incorporate the arts into the Intuit Dome, the arena on which the Steve Ballmer-owned team broke ground in 2021 and planned to open ahead of the 2024-2025 season. When Wood’s friend recounted this conversation to him, Wood recalls, “I said, ‘Well, I would love to do the court.’ And he was like, ‘Well, let me talk to her.’” Not long after, Zucker told Wood that she would indeed like him to design a court on which the team would play select games, as well as special uniforms that the team’s players would wear on those occasions.
“The NBA has always been into art, in a way, with the creativity of the shoes and all the apparel,” notes Wood, 48, who grew up rooting for the Celtics, but has frequently attended Clippers and Lakers games since moving to L.A. 22 years ago, and has been a Clippers season ticket holder for the past five years. “I’m just obsessed with basketball,” he continues. “I’ve been making art about basketball and my love of basketball as part of different typologies of work that I make, because I’m a figurative painter and I paint everything that’s in my life around me. And one of the things that’s around me a lot is basketball.”
Zucker and Wood decided to launch their collaboration a year before the Intuit Dome opened, during the 2023-2024 season, when the Clippers still shared the Crypto.com Arena with the Lakers. Eight Clippers home games would feature Wood’s work in a more limited way than the Intuit Dome later would: with a reimagined team logo that would appear both on the team’s hardwood and on new jerseys.
“I made thousands of sketches — quick sketches, with my designer — and did a lot of research on their old logos and their new logos,” Wood says. “Gillian was always pushing for it to be more radical and non-conventional.” The result was a logo that proclaimed “Clips” — a nickname which fans and team owner Steve Ballmer had increasingly begun adopting — rather than “Clippers,” with two basketballs piercing the “A” in “L.A.” that appeared ahead of it. It worked well on the court and on jerseys: “I was going for an old-school ’90s NBA jersey because that’s what I grew up — really clean, really straightforward, a colorway with cool graphic, and that’s it.” The Clippers’ players and fans seemed to love it, so the team and Wood decided to up the ante for the 2024-2025 season.
Between Sunday, Nov. 17, 2024, and Saturday, April 5, 2025, the Clippers designated eight contests in the Intuit Dome as “City Edition” games, during which their players competed on an even more elaborate Wood-designed court while wearing Wood-designed jerseys. The hardwood featured the L.A. logo with the two basketballs — now alongside a large colorful flower, surrounded by what appears up close to be wavy lines of lacquer, but was actually the overprint of wood grain on top of wood grain. “I think putting a big flower in the middle of the court is pretty radical,” Wood asserts. “They basically let me put a big painting on the court.”
Wood’s season tickets are three rows behind the Clippers’ bench. “I love to watch the interaction right there,” he says. “They’re larger than life, the coach and the ref and the players. You see so much. It’s awesome. If you like basketball, to be able to be that close and to see people talking to each other and interacting? It’s insane.” As for the fact that many of those same people were competing on a court and wearing a jersey featuring something that came out of his own imagination? He’s still processing that, but imagines it will eventually sink in: “I think I’ll look back and be like, ‘That is fucking crazy, that one of my big paintings was on there and they let me do this.’”
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