The Miami-based photographer Rose Marie Cromwell is not a huge boxing fan, and she’s never even put on the gloves herself. But for Cromwell, her interest in documenting life in Cuba—a passion of hers for the last 20 years—has led her to take an extraordinary series of pictures of women boxers in Havana.

Some images are sweaty and active, showing boxers in the moment of combat, and others evoke the sport without depicting blows being landed. “The Gym” (2023) is a still life of punching bags that seem to silently anticipate the action to come, and in “The Mirror” (2023), a young practicing boxer sees her reflection, and the picture captures someone sizing herself up. Both photographs are in the exhibition Strike Fast, Dance Lightly: Artists on Boxing at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, on view October 26 through March 9.

“It’s a story of women’s empowerment,” says Cromwell, who spent two days furiously taking photographs in 2023, since that was the limited access she could get inside Cuba. Until 2022, it was illegal for women to box, and she wanted to be there as the country’s first national women’s boxing team was formed.

“Boxing holds a huge cultural value in Cuba,” Cromwell says. And she noticed something about the people who participate in the sport. “It’s not about the opponent, it’s about you remaining meditative and anticipating what’s next,” she says. “It’s a fight with your own self.” (Cromwell also had a recent solo show of photographs of the American West at the ICA Miami.)

“The Mirror” (2023), by Rose Marie Cromwell. From the series “Pugilista.”

The Norton show comes at a time when the meeting point of athleticism and aesthetics seems to be in the air, given a more broadly themed sports art show, Get in the Game: Sports, Arts, Culture, on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art from October 19 through February 18. “There’s this old idea that art and sport can’t be bedfellows,” says Christopher Bedford, SFMoMA’s director. “That’s a total falsehood.”

For Arden Sherman, the Norton contemporary art curator who organized the boxing show, the key was to find layers of nuance in the more than 100 works she selected.

“It changed my view on how artists approach boxing,” says Sherman, who dreamed up the exhibition because she was looking for a juicy group show arranged around a theme. “I saw a lot of straightforward depictions of boxers, and I became less and less interested in those. I learned that I am most attracted to the more nuanced takes.”

The more metaphorical, the better, as far as Sherman is concerned. “Some artists look at boxing as offense, as in fighting for rights or equality, and others see the protective, defensive element,” she says.

“Muhammad Ali, St. Sebastian, from African Spirits Series” (2008), by Samuel Fosso.

The Norton exhibition—which was organized with the Church in Sag Harbor, New York, and the FLAG Art Foundation in New York City, where smaller versions of it appeared—includes two works by the Ashcan School painter George Bellows, perhaps the most famous depictor of boxing, including “Club Night” (1907). But it finds room for contemporary works like the artist Daniel Arsham’s sculpture “Blue Calcite Boxing Set” (2016), a deconstructed set of gloves, shorts, and boots.

The show includes artists as varied as Diane Arbus, Ed Ruscha, Edward Hopper, and Keith Haring, and there are even four drawings by the Greatest of All Time himself, Muhammad Ali. In one of Ali’s quickly sketched drawings, done in pen, a victorious boxer raises his arms in triumph, and the cartoon speech bubble says “$$$$ BANK.” Sherman believes that the “approachable” topic will bring people to the Norton, particularly middle-aged men, a group that is not always the first to suggest a museum outing. “Everyone in the world knows what boxing is,” she says. “This sport is not locked in geographically—it’s a huge multiplex.”

The ubiquity of sports is an obvious reason that artists use it as inspiration…

This story is an excerpt from PALMER Vol. 6. To read the full story, pre-order the print issue here.

[Lead image: “Club Night” (1907), by George Bellows. Image courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington]