Beer + Cigarettes

TYRRELL WINSTON (B. 1985)
Beer + Cigarettes
signed ‘Tyrrell Winston’ (lower right)
ink on photograph
6 5/8 × 10 1/8 inches (16.8 × 25.7 cm)
Executed in 2024.

NOTES: 
Born in Southern California in 1985 and now based in Detroit, Tyrrell Winston is a multidisciplinary artist whose work examines sport, celebrity, memory, and the systems through which cultural value is assigned. His practice began with collecting discarded objects from the streets and basketball courts of Manhattan and Brooklyn. By reorganizing worn basketballs, abandoned nets, and other found materials, Winston transforms overlooked objects into records of use, aspiration, and collective experience.

In Beer + Cigarettes, Winston presents a found image of an arena scoreboard displaying the familiar red-and-white branding of Winston cigarettes. The artist’s handwritten title runs along the image’s edge, linking the spectacle of professional sport with two fixtures of American consumer culture: drinking and smoking. Encapsulated in a PSA slab, the work adopts the language of sports-card authentication and collecting. Winston uses that institutional framing to elevate an otherwise modest piece of ephemera, questioning why certain objects become valuable, preserved, and culturally significant while others are discarded. The result condenses several recurring concerns in his practice: sport, branding, vice, nostalgia, and the construction of value.

Winston’s work has been presented internationally, with solo exhibitions at Cranbrook Art Museum, Library Street Collective, Stems Gallery, Volery Gallery, and LANDMARK and Belowground in Hong Kong. His work is held in collections including Cranbrook Art Museum, the Columbus Museum of Art, Nike, Aimé Leon Dore, and the Detroit Pistons.

Read our interview with Tyrrell Winston here.