Tucked into a storage closet-turned gallery space at the back of the Southern Utah Museum of Art, Bianca Velasquez’s You’re the Best! A Prize Installation glimmers from mirror tiles and metallic shimmer, deep within a black tunnel. Trophies line shelves like those in a kid’s bedroom or a ’70s-era man cave, bringing glamour back to these dusty objects of yesteryear. A nostalgic ode to coming of age, the show is gaudy and kitschy while remaining elegant in its display of athletic-core regalia. The gallery is so narrow you could touch each side; viewers are brought eye-level with trophy displays that are quickly realized not to be awards from our middle school spelling bee.

Velasquez’s friend purchased the defunct Salt Lake City trophy store, Trophies Inc., inheriting an inventory of meaningless awards whose moment to honor never came. Once symbols of accomplishment—metallic statuettes mounted on linoleum-panel bases, engraved with impersonal congratulations—these trophies gathered dust throughout our youth. Velasquez reconsiders who and what we celebrate, transforming symbols of grand achievement into witty celebrations of the underappreciated, the quotidian victories, the small dog. She reminds us that everyday accomplishments—those small wins, our loyal best friend day in and day out—deserve recognition. Man’s best friend, a cocker spaniel, tops a trophy taller than the rest, its plaque reading “Most Loyal.” Nearby, a chicken stands proudly on a podium labeled “Best Breasts.”

It is a wildly American gesture to feel the need for flauntable physical objects to represent achievement. Trophies can serve as nostalgic memorabilia from childhood, reminders of hard work and effort. Or they can sit forgotten in an attic until someone dies, or the attic gets finished and needs to be cleaned out and they are sent along to the thrift store where no one else wants an anonymous bowling trophy from 1972. Velasquez breathes new life into these former icons of achievement.

The pennants—like those celebrating records in high school gymnasiums—use pleather and mirror tiles to speak to both adolescence and the social-media-crazed teen years that we Zillennials are still grappling with today. One reads, “Winner winner chicken dinner,” a classic schoolyard chant. Its sibling banner proclaims, “Victory NOT Vanity,” with medals and pins hanging like fringe from the edge. Together they remind our accomplishment-obsessed, claw-to-the-top-at-anyone’s-expense culture—i.e. the valoration of Marty Supreme—that it’s not about personal achievements, but collective victories, that will take us far.

Velasquez’s basketball hoop is by far the most sophisticated piece in the show. Delicately beaded and carefully assembled, it hangs softly from ornamental metal legs, with larger crystals anchoring the woven glass-bead net. It is elegant but remains playful, reminiscent of summertime nights before the street lights come on, the neighborhood kids playing street ball, or the hoop that hangs above the garage door in the back alley. These memories are crystallized forever. In a related piece, Velasquez uses faux pearls to bead a soccer goal as a nod to her father, a lifelong soccer fan and coach. These works feel dreamy and fantastical, sitting like artifacts in vitrines of memory.

The glitz and glamour of the exhibition reinterprets the athletic, hard-core nature of competitive sports as an invitation to be proud of our daily wins. Velasquez celebrates the little guys, the everyday victories, the collective triumphs, the forgotten. A small show yet conceptual in nature, You’re The Best honors the goofiness of this life, the quirks of everyone’s talents, how one friend’s trash is another friend’s treasure.

You’re the Best, Southern Utah Museum of Art, Cedar City, through March 7.

Genevieve Vahl

Genevieve Vahl is a writer, farmer and artist from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Her writing focuses on how art and community intersect, how to bring access to food and covering climate solutions around the Salt Lake Valley. She also writes poetry, binds artist books, makes paper and runs cyanotype prints from film.