Silk screen

Muhammad Ali, a three-time heavyweight boxing champ, learned about art from his father, Cassius Clay Sr., a sign painter and muralist, and from sports artist LeRoy Neiman, with whom Ali developed a lifelong friendship. Ali’s 1979 serigraph print, Float Like a Butterfly, Sting Like a Bee, is a self-portrait that tells a story from his own boxing career.

 

In a 2016 article for The Guardian, reporter Steven W. Thrasher said that, “Ali was clearly a performer, but he was also a visual artist, of a genre which could generously be called outsider art. Looking at his works circa 1979 . . . there is an irrepressible joy in it. . . . The artwork is childlike in its use of bright, expressive crayon-like colours. The crowds watching him fight in Sting Like a Bee are represented with white, yellow and brown smiley faces . . . Everything about Ali was art, from combat to philanthropy. Ali was not just one of the world’s greatest international athletes but a cultural phenomenon whose influence is impossible to quantify.”