A Saturday With the Bush League
by Colette Copeland
October 23, 2019
Glasstire.com
On Saturday, October 19, I spent the afternoon at Sweet Pass Sculpture Park in Dallas for the opening reception and performances for Bush League, the current exhibition by the Texas-based art collective BUXTOOF/Cattywampus Press. San Antonio artists Daedelus Hoffman and Lindsay Starr founded the press and the exhibition project Dirty Dark Place (Backdoor Biennial). The duo’s mission is to provide free creative experiences in non-traditional settings. Hoffman gave me a tour of the Sweet Pass exhibition, which includes a lot of site-specific interventions within the park and addresses a baseball theme. On the day I was there, the performances and installations generated a carnival-like atmosphere.
My first encounter was with men wearing ‘Bush League’ baseball jerseys. The center of the park had been transformed into a baseball diamond. There was a rubber chicken wrapped in barbed wire on the pitcher’s mound — a ‘choked chicken’ reference. And the sexual (i.e. baseball) references continued throughout the day, including what I thought was a sex shack in the rear corner of the lot. Thankfully some little leaguers set me straight and told me it was a dugout. I had my Bush League tarot card reading by Olivia Salazar. Evidently, something bad is imminent in my future, since the slugger card was upside down. I played catch with the mascot Petie Sweet (Matthew Maher) and refrained from getting a Wild Thing/Major League Charlie Sheen hair cut. I did however, witness three others getting a Wild Thing cut, courtesy of Sweet Pass co-founder Tamara Johnson.
