The main entrance to Barclays Center at Atlantic and Flatbush avenues now has a ceiling full of moving pictures. Brooklyn Sports & Entertainment, which runs the arena along with the Brooklyn Nets and the New York Liberty, announced on Oct. 21 that it has finished the third phase of its arena overhaul, and the centerpiece is WAVE, a new site-specific installation by the artist Sarah Sze suspended over the rebuilt Main Atrium.

The work is made of 550 custom acrylic LED screens, each shaped as a small sculpture, arranged together into a curving form that follows the architecture of the atrium. Across those screens, Sze runs projected images of birds in flight, rushing water, trees, changing skies and Brooklyn street scenes, which build and travel across the piece in a rolling motion. According to the arena, it is the largest moving-image installation Sze has made. A 180-degree LED wall next to it carries the imagery further for people coming in from the plaza.

Who Sarah Sze is

Sze is a MacArthur Fellow who represented the United States at the 2013 Venice Biennale. New Yorkers have likely walked past her public work before: her past commissions include pieces for the High Line, the Second Avenue Subway and LaGuardia Airport. When the arena first announced the commission in April, it described a piece of more than 250 screens; the finished work, per the October announcement, has 550.

Two paintings at the new Flatbush entrance

The atrium is not the only new art in the building. A new entrance off Flatbush Avenue, built for American Express card members, now holds two large paintings. One is Mark Bradford's Tina (2006), a circular composition of singed end papers and silver foil that grows out of Bradford's memories of time spent in his mother's hair salon. The other is Rashid Johnson's Untitled Anxious Audience (2019), a grid of faces worked in black soap and wax on white ceramic tile, which was part of Johnson's retrospective at the Guggenheim.

All three works belong to Brooklyn Art Encounters, a multi-year art program the arena launched this year under Brooklyn Sports & Entertainment vice chair Clara Wu Tsai, with Andria Hickey, formerly chief curator at The Shed, as curatorial advisor. Its advisory group includes Brooklyn Museum director Anne Pasternak and Studio Museum in Harlem director Thelma Golden.

What else is coming to the plaza

The program has more on its schedule. A bronze sculpture by Kambui Olujimi, We Always Have Room For One More, is planned for the plaza at Flatbush and Atlantic in spring 2027. It shows seven figures playing Skelly, the bottle-cap street game, and draws on the artist's childhood in Bedford-Stuyvesant and on the plaza's long use as a neighborhood meeting spot. A separate series called Art on the Hour plays a 60-second work by a different artist each month on the Oculus screen above the plaza, at the top of every hour, through spring 2027. Earlier pieces still in and around the arena include Ursula von Rydingsvard's Ona and works by José Parlá, Mickalene Thomas, Tavares Strachan and Adam Pendleton.

The rest of phase three

The new atrium also brought a rebuilt box office with separate counters for ticket problems and general guest questions, while the ticket windows facing Flatbush Avenue stay in place. Inside, the event-level club was redesigned around the look of DUMBO's old industrial buildings, with steel trusses, brick and concrete, and a hanging piece made from sections of the herringbone court the Nets played on from 2012 to 2019. The arena also replaced the equipment in its control room for the first time since the building opened in 2012, which runs the video boards and game broadcasts.

Brooklyn Sports & Entertainment describes the project as a five-year transformation worth more than $150 million. Populous led the design and Shawmut Design and Construction managed the build. The next two phases will concentrate on the upper concourse. The work was timed to be ready for the 2026-27 NBA season, which is also the Nets' 60th anniversary season.

How to see it

WAVE hangs in the Main Atrium, the arena's primary entrance at 620 Atlantic Avenue, on the corner of Flatbush Avenue. The Atlantic Av-Barclays Ctr subway station, served by the 2, 3, 4, 5, B, D, N, Q and R trains, opens onto the plaza, and the Long Island Rail Road's Atlantic Terminal is across the street. Fans arriving through the main doors for a Nets game, Liberty game or concert walk in beneath it. The arena's full list of Brooklyn Art Encounters works is posted at barclayscenter.com/art.

Sources