Beginning with the Negro National League in 1920 to the last official game in 1960, black baseball contributed in numerous ways to African American life. Athletes were the first black superstars and sports was the major form of recreation in the community. Negro League baseball, in particular, was the province of the common man—more accessible to working class people than basketball, football and boxing. The story of the Negro Leagues, more than any other sport, goes to the heart of African Americana. The folkloric legacy was rendered with vivid, chromatic colors in Shades of Greatness: Art Inspired by Negro Leagues Baseball on display at the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City, August 17, 2003 to October 15, 2003.

The 27 exhibiting artists—a mix of male and female, young and old, African American and non-African American—created monumental works ranging from nostalgic oil-on-canvas renditions of old baseball stadiums to a wooden sculpture of a bat fashioned in the shape of a question mark. These artists, in the words of bell hooks, “offered an aesthetic pedagogy that ran counter to the notions of ?great art' produced primarily for elite audiences.” However, recognizing that the heyday of the League was during the Great Depression and its very existence owed to adversity and pain as well as the ritual reclaiming of a collective nobility within the context of sport.

One artist in the show, Kadir Nelson, paid particular attention to those details that drew the spectator closer.

Nelson's four pieces Bullet Rogan, Low and Away, Oscar Charleston and Willie Foster & Young Fans capture the essence of the black male athlete as a hero, as the center of a community, and as the model of success for both men and boys. In Willie Foster & Young Fans, Foster is surrounded by four boys who are seeking to emulate him in every way, from the “dead pan” expression on his face, to the way he stands with his feet pointed outward. One notices the marginal figures eyeing Foster: an older man, from his chair in front of the barber shop; the shoe salesman in front of his storefront, the numbers runner making his rounds and the women pausing to take a look at what seems to be a “good catch.” The folds in Foster's suit are perfect in every way.

In other works, the wizened facial expressions of Oscar Charleston and “Bullet” Rogan are expressions to be studied, as light dances on the smallest of details.

I have often expressed in my writing, my grandfather's desire for me to play baseball when I was a child. I was never much interested in the game, not until becoming an adult, when I finally understood the significance of those men to my grandfather. By talking to me about baseball, the sport of his childhood heroes, “Pops” was trying to influence the type of man I would become.