Maodo Lo, the lissome Columbia senior attracting NBA attention this season, snatched a brochure as he walked into the Susan Eley Fine Art gallery on the Upper West Side one recent afternoon.
“I like to understand the reasons and inspirations when I go see artwork,” he said, tugging his earbuds out from underneath a gray hoodie.
The gallery’s director, Susan Eisner Eley, approached, and within minutes, she was leading Lo on a tour of the salon-style showcase of exposed brick walls covered with vibrant, frenzied works: grays, violets, reds and blues.
“She’s a colorist,” Eley said of the artist. “Just like your mom.”
Lo flashed a smile. Even as his college career nears its end, few know that Lo’s mother, Elvira Bach, is a renowned German postmodernist painter and sculptor whose pieces have hung inside the Guggenheim and the Museum of Modern Art, and other galleries in places like Paris, London, Lisbon, Vancouver and Venice.
When Columbia’s coach, Kyle Smith, who recruited Lo four years ago out of a prep school in western Massachusetts, found this out recently, he pulled Lo aside.
“I knew she was an artist, but I’m like, dude,” Smith said. “That’s like saying my dad used to coach — he’s in Springfield,” referring to the site of the Basketball Hall of Fame.
It is not that Lo does not want to tell people. It just never comes up, he often says with a shrug. His mother’s artistic talent would seem to have little relevance to his blossoming basketball career, which has placed him firmly in contention to become the first Columbia player to win the Ivy League’s Player of the Year award since Craig Austin in 2001.
But on off days, and especially before and after the season, the 6-foot Lo regularly finds time to wander into galleries like this one, where the paintings seem to speak to him in ways that the basketball gym does not.
Though Lo claims to have little artistic talent of his own, he treasures these escapes from the rigors of basketball, and says he visits the galleries to show appreciation to the artists.
“I know how much work you have to put in,” he said. “You can’t just say I’m going to draw a painting today. It’s a process — you need to be inspired, you need to have the right energy, the right ideas. You need to be cognizant of what the viewers might like. You have to trust your own creativity and let it go.”
In an email through her assistant, who translated the message from German, Bach wrote that she never pushed Lo toward either athletics or art, but rather allowed him to find his passion on his own.
“He is not an Artist as I am,” she wrote. “He is an Artist from another perspective, an Artist with a Basketball in his Hands. To me, Basketball is Art when I watch Maodo because we both are using our hands to create and build impressions.”Raised in Berlin, Lo was named after a celebrated West African religious figure, Malick Sy, by his father, Alioune, a couscous farmer who lives in Kaffrine, a southern region of Senegal. People referred to Sy as Maodo, which he translated as the Great One, although Lo hesitated to mention this. He did not want to seem boastful.
Soft-spoken and reserved, Lo has developed into one of the Ivy League’s most dangerous players. He leads the conference in steals, averaging 2.3 a game, good for 14th in Division I, and has made more 3-pointers than anyone else in Columbia’s history. He has bolstered his midrange game, too, incorporating techniques for shooting from his off-foot used by Atlanta Hawks guard Dennis Schroeder, one of Lo’s teammates on the German national team.
Columbia (20-9, 9-3 Ivy League) is fighting for its first NCAA tournament berth since 1968.
Lo’s play has earned him comparisons to NBA players like the 14-year veteran Leandro Barbosa and to Patty Mills, whom Smith coached at St. Mary’s. Lo’s game, Smith said, has a light-footed, almost airy quality.
“He can get to the basket and there’s no contact anywhere — he doesn’t get touched,” Smith said.
Lo’s finesse is largely self-made. His father favored soccer, and though Bach said that she used to run triathlons and her mother played handball, her son discovered basketball on his own.
Her understanding of the game grew accordingly. Lo said that she used to attend his youth games, bring a newspaper, and forget to put the paper down when play resumed after timeouts.
Their home, which was like its own art gallery, with paintings and looming sculptures and zebra-striped wallpaper, looked far different from his friends’ places. As a boy, he admitted having difficulty reconciling his mother’s artistic persona — her look often included large sunglasses and a polychrome turban — with what seemed cool.
“When I was in school, I’d tell me mom, ‘Please don’t wear the turban, don’t wear your sunglasses,’” Lo said. “It wasn’t normal. But as I grew older, I understood — she’s an artist, she is cool, it’s cool the way she dresses. I started to appreciate it.”
Lo, who has one older brother, used to travel with Bach to exhibitions of her latest works. It was on those trips, Bach wrote, that “Maodo started to learn and understand my life.”
“I loved it, to be honest,” Lo said. “I ate interesting foods, stayed in interesting places, met interesting people.”
When it came time to pursue his basketball career — first at a prep school in western Massachusetts, then at Columbia, the only place he officially visited — Lo kept his family background mostly to himself. His freshman roommate, Isaac Cohen, said Lo was quiet. Then one day, he mentioned that he was going downtown to Chelsea to visit an art gallery, so Cohen tagged along.
“I think it’s just part of his life,” Cohen said. “It’s second nature. I’ve seen pictures of his apartment back home in Berlin, and her work is everywhere. You can see it in the color of the couches and the rugs. Art is just something he’s drawn to.”
At the Eley gallery, Lo was drawn to a painting of Egon Schiele, the early Austrian expressionist, which seemed to convey a deeper message about masculinity. He noticed a painting of a nude woman on one of the walls and, after inspecting it, asked the director for the name of the work.
“Tessa,” Eley said.
Lo began to laugh. “I know a girl named Tessa,” he said.
“Does she look like that?”
Lo blushed.
Before leaving the gallery, he pulled a book out of his backpack that contained his mother’s latest artwork. He flipped to a picture of a 2007 painting called “24 Hours,” which depicts a woman wearing lipstick and bright blue eye shadow holding a young boy in her lap. That’s me, Lo said.
Are there any paintings that include basketball?
“I’ve been trying to get her to do that for years,” Lo said. “She’s not interested.”
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