CHICAGO (AP) — Sitting in the middle of his All Star Press gallery in Logan Square, Zissou Tasseff-Elenkoff sees a Chicago that loves its art and sports. Murals and sculptures and statues. Football, baseball, basketball and more.
It’s only natural, he says, that they should all play together.
“I think the connections to the sports community is really deep,” Tasseff-Elenkoff says, “and that resonates to anybody, whether you’re a chef or whether you’re a plumber or an artist.”
Tasseff-Elenkoff, a San Francisco native and who also has lived in Paris and London, is an artist and a sports fan — a perfect partner for a unique project with the Chicago White Sox.
Working with Tasseff-Elenkoff, the White Sox are rolling out 28 concert-style posters this season that were created by a total of 12 artists in Chicago and a couple more major league cities. The posters have been limited to the digital space so far, but the team plans to start selling some of them in its charity corner at its ballpark beginning next month.
Each of the posters focuses on the upcoming series between the White Sox and their opponent, incorporating colors and elements from each franchise and home city. While the last-place White Sox have piled up losses on the field, the posters at least have generated a few fleeting moments of praise from fans otherwise frustrated with the state of the franchise.
“This is a very popular football thing, and we had never really seen it approached by a baseball team because it could seem like a lot,” said Tim Brogdon, the director of digital content for the White Sox. “There’s a lot of series, a lot of games.
“But we wanted to try to tackle it to try to connect a bunch of people with the Chicago art community, with other fan bases, try to find new ways to engage our fans.”
Tasseff-Elenkoff started working with the Chicago Bulls in 2016, and he got connected to the White Sox — another Jerry Reinsdorf-owned franchise — through Jon Shoemaker, the executive director of creative services for the NBA team.
Tasseff-Elenkoff has been collaborating with the White Sox for about six years on a variety of projects. He credited Gareth Breunlin, the senior director of marketing and advertising for the baseball club, with the idea for the posters.
Tasseff-Elenkoff was tasked with finding the artists for the project. He also created the posters for series with the New York Yankees and St. Louis Cardinals.
“It’s been great to see, kind of, the different styles and different aesthetics and how they kind of all have that, you know, centralized focus of the culture of the White Sox and what that means to the city,” he said, “and how it kind of manifests itself in fans and hopefully the art that we’re making to kind of try and make those connections.”
Twenty-two posters have been unveiled so far. With each artist applying their own approach, the style, look and feel varies from poster to poster.
Joe Nelson created a comic-like tribute to backyard baseball for a May series at Toronto. Mwanel Pierre-Louis’ poster for this month’s trip to Miami resembled a playing card. Joseph Perez’s illustration for a June series against Arizona had a White Sox slugger with a snake wrapped around his bat.
Kate Lewis, who also has worked with the Cubs, Bulls and Blackhawks through her connection to Tasseff-Elenkoff and All Star Press, was assigned series against the Athletics, Rangers, Mariners and Astros for the White Sox project.
With her posters, Lewis has been staying with what she described as the White Sox color palette while leaning into the other team for the backdrop.
“So for the Mariners, you could see I did like kind of an underwater one,” she said. “It’s got a porthole in it and it’s on the deck of a cruise ship, but it’s very White Sox heavy colors. So that was kind of how I did that split. And then same with the Astros. I put it in outer space. There’s some planets in the background.”
Lewis isn’t much of a sports fan, but she has enjoyed the crossover between sports and her art.
“What I love about working with sports teams is that they all kind of have a theme to them,” she said. “They have their mascots. They have the environments that the sports teams are in, so I kind of lean more into the personality behind them.”
The White Sox plan to have some version of the poster series again in 2025. What it looks like could depend in part on if the team is able to bring on a sponsor for the content.
“The city of Chicago has embraced art and sport in a way that I’ve never experienced it before,” Brogdon said, “and so there was already this great established relationship, and we’re just continuing to build that.”
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