The floor is the canvas. That’s the premise behind Geometry of Play, Sharmistha Ray’s new public art installation at Arts Landing in downtown Pittsburgh, and it might just be the most quietly radical thing to happen to both art and sport this year.
Ray, an artist, writer, and educator born in Kolkata and raised in Kuwait before settling in the United States, has always worked in the language of vibrant geometric abstraction. Their paintings draw from South Asian visual traditions, including kaleidoscopic mandalas and architectural ornamentation, filtered through a lens of queerness, migration, and belonging. It’s rich, layered work. So when the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust commissioned Ray to create a mural across three pickleball courts for their inaugural public art program at Arts Landing, the choice wasn’t arbitrary. They needed someone who understood that abstraction isn’t just decoration. It’s meaning.
Designer: Sharmistha Ray
Geometry of Play is made up of large-scale murals painted directly onto the playing surfaces of three 22-by-40-foot pickleball courts, making them the first artist-designed pickleball courts in the entire country. Interlocking circles, triangles, and grids move across the pavement in bold, saturated color. Up close, it reads like a painting you’d frame and hang in a gallery. From a drone view, it’s something closer to architecture, or maybe a quilt, or a mandala. All of those things at once.
What strikes me about this project is how well it understands its context. Pickleball is famously communal. It’s not a solitary sport of stoic concentration. It’s loud and social and a little chaotic, and the people who love it tend to love it deeply. Ray’s work doesn’t ignore that energy; it amplifies it. The mural creates a constantly shifting visual and physical experience as players move across the court. The geometry doesn’t sit still. It responds to motion, to foot traffic, to the unpredictable choreography of the game itself…