THREE CHEERS FOR JJ KAPLAN!

THE GOLD NET PROJECT

We can’t all be Jeremy John Kaplan, can we?  JJ is a middle aged man who grew up in New York City doing the usual things that people do growing up…nothing startling. He didn’t develop an app and make a million dollars —he wasn’t a medical phenom — he didn’t write a best seller when he was in high school — he didn’t speak to the United Nations about inequality (or anything else!)

No, JJ is just a typical guy — school, home, shoot a few hoops on the neighborhood playground, grow up to be ….an artist?

Kaplan is that but his “art” falls into a groove hard to describe. He practices tactical urbanism; it’s a combination of performance and civic responsibility. 

Urban playgrounds nearly all have basketball hoops and nine times out of ten, the net is gone or partly gone or hanging by three threads. So Kaplan began his very own “Gold Net Project.” He dresses all in white, a uniform that looks like a cross between the IceCream Man and your average house painter. He drags his ladder to the spot and attaches a new GOLD basketball net. There’s no significance to the color except maybe to instantly identify the ones he’s replaced. There are 291 gold nets at 112 courts so far. (And he’s repainted lines on two but that’s a little out of his purview.)

Kaplan pays for the whole project by making and selling photographs, prints, drawings — all related somehow to basketball courts and nets. He’s been run off a few times by city officials but mostly, people leave him alone. 

Do new basketball nets change lives? Hard to say but for people playing basketball on those courts, nets are a symbol, a spotlight on a very small piece of life that says someone is paying attention to them, their needs, the quality of their environment… like picking up trash…planting flowers…any effort that adds solace and comfort to the shared public space.  Even better, those nets add quality and aesthetic improvement to shared space. What better art form is there than that?

In this world that we share, are we all required to be a tactical urbanist? Or is this just a newly invented term to describe what our parents taught us as kids, a part of the Girl and Boy Scout mottos, The Golden Rule? Whatever it is, I’m grateful to hear stories about the JJ Kaplans out there. Nice goin’.