The Tabloids Are Fouling Mayor Mamdani Over His Knicks Art. Here's The Story

Tom Sanford says the real story behind his Knicks Cutout paintings is being flattened into a superstition. The New York painter says Mayor Zohran Mamdani invited him to loan the works to City Hall in recognition of the New York Knicks' playoff run, a gesture meant to celebrate the team and the city around it. What followed, Sanford argues, was a wave of coverage that turned a civic moment into a jinx narrative.

Sanford says the pieces have also been misidentified. They are not cardboard cutouts of players, he said, but hand-painted wooden cutout paintings. Their visual language comes from a very specific New York memory: the life-size figures that once stood outside neighborhood delis, pizzerias, and bagel shops on the west side of Manhattan, where Sanford moved in the 1990s. One image that stayed with him was the cartoon pizza man outside Pronto Pizza at 114th Street and Broadway.

That street-corner vernacular became the framework for a personal Knicks tribute. Sanford's all-time starting five, as he describes it, is Jalen Brunson, Latrell Sprewell, Larry Johnson, Carmelo Anthony, and Patrick Ewing, with John Starks as sixth man. The project, he says, is the work of a fan - one shaped as much by the city's storefront culture as by basketball.

The paintings were first made for an art and basketball fundraiser at Brooklyn Bowl to benefit the Food Bank for New York. This year, Sanford brought them out in Harlem during another Knicks playoff run, where they drew a crowd and social media attention. Mamdani later liked one of the posts and, Sanford says, brought the art to City Hall. Sanford also said his daughter, Cecily, met the mayor.

For Sanford, the episode points to something larger than a playoff storyline. It is a reminder that New York's sports culture, neighborhood imagery, and public life still overlap in ways that can feel both intimate and unmistakably local.

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