Capturing the legacy of Rickwood Field

How painter Chuck Styles captured Negro Leagues history for the MLB Rickwood Field game

Chuck Styles

Baseball fans will recognize Chuck Styles’ art from Topps’ Project 70 and through Styles’ work at this year’s MLB tribute to the Negro Leagues at Rickwood Field, but he’s been an artist for as long as he can remember - though he never expected it to become his profession. “I’d always been a creative child. I never saw myself being an artist growing up. I didn’t know that being artist was a real thing,” Styles shares. Instead, after high school, Styles went into barbering. He spent ten years cutting hair, and used that money to enroll in the Art Institute of Philadelphia where he studied Media Arts and Animation.

When Styles turned 30, he stepped away from barbering to become a full-time artist. Since then, he has worked with companies like HBO, BET, NASCAR, Marvel, Topps, the United States Postal Service (where he painted the Hank Aaron stamp), and of course, MLB. Though Styles had not previously been a big baseball fan, his first baseball gig fell into place when his colleague Greg Cummins pitched him as a name for the Topps Project 70, which introduced him to the sports world and the sports audience. His card sales did very well, which opened the door for other sports gigs, including the USPS stamp featuring Hammerin’ Hank, which he considers “a dream that I never knew, come true.”

Though Styles is a visual artist, his research does not begin and end with the visual. He actually starts each research process within his own community, speaking to older family members and asking what it was like during those earlier years of baseball, when Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier, and how things have changed over the years. He then turns to the internet and text sources, but he also listens to music of the time period from when his subjects lived so he can stay in that mental space as he works.

As for the tidbits he gravitates to in his research, Styles likes to focus on the stories that aren’t wholly baseball related. “I like to pick up the stories that are really about the character of the individual, their personal life, whether they were a family man or not. Whether they faced scrutiny or hardships. Because if the art does call for it, you’re able to tell a deeper story about what this individual went through besides just stats. Every athlete has stats, but very few have a story that people want to learn about.”

Chuck Styles

Styles was particularly excited about working with MLB for the Rickwood Field game partially because of the game’s historical impact, but also because MLB gave him a lot of creative freedom. “That’s one thing as an artist you really love to hear. You trust my vision, you believe that my aesthetic is the best fit for what you guys want to do.”

One particularly poignant moment from the experience was learning, just as Styles’ plane was landing in Birmingham, Alabama for the event, that Willie Mays had passed away. Styles had designed a large mural of Mays for the game, which quickly became a memorial and place for tributes. “It was a very emotional moment because we were supposed to celebrate the life of Willie Mays and we ended up turning it into a memorial ceremony.” Mays’ death hit even harder for Styles, as his own own grandfather had just passed away the week before. “It was very emotional, but at the same time very humbling experience to walk on the field and know that so much history was made on that field. That legacy is really powerful. The Rickwood Stadium project is something I’ll never forget.”

Check out Chuck Styles’ work on his website here.