Artists of Olympic Proportions!

Tammi Henke
Sep 13, 2024
2 min read

Last month's blog post was about the history of Olympic medals at one time being given out to areas of the arts like sculpture, painting, and architecture. While medals are not currently awarded for the arts anymore(although there is a call to reinstate this practice), there are many athletes who compete in the Olympics that are also artists as well! Did you know that there is actually a very unique category of people who have participated in the Olympic Games(some even earning medals), and are also artists in their own right—many having their own businesses or sales of their artwork. They are known as, "Olympian Artists." The artwork featured above, The Olympic Art Project, was part of an initiative led by the Olympic Museum during the Winter Games held in PyeongChang, in 2018. Over 100 athletes from all over the world took part, and working together, they created 15 paintings during the Games, representing the various winter sports competitions. When arranged together, the paintings reveal the Olympic rings. You can read more about this collaborative art project here if you would like.

Below, you can check out 3 of these Olympian artists, and learn a bit of their stories. If you would like to find out more about this unique group of athletes, you can view lots of other athletes and their artwork by clicking on this Olympic website. It is great to to see such amazing accomplishments in athletics, and it is also great to see that these athletes can be accomplished in other ways as well. So many times we forget that people are not just one-dimensional--that we as individuals, can be multi-talented and multi-faceted. These Olympian artists show us, that we can be great swimmers, as well as like to knit. We can excel at using our hands for basketball, while also using them to make pottery or sculpture. And that we can use our minds to focus on the precision of hitting a target, but can also use them to creating something from just our imagination. What a great way to be reminded, that the arts are entwined in, and available to us all.