Ernie Barnes grew up in "The Bottom," a segregated neighborhood just outside of Durham, North Carolina, where he took an early interest to art and was regularly found drawing in the mud with sticks. His mother would occasionally take him with her to work, where she was employed in the household of Frank L. Fuller Jr., an attorney and art enthusiast. Fuller encouraged young Ernie to read through the numerous art books in his home, and by the first grade, he was familiar with the titans of the art historical canon, including Michelangelo, Peter Paul Rubens, and Henri Toulouse-Lautrec. This education was profoundly important to Barnes' development, as he would have been denied entrance to the prominent art museums because of the Jim Crow laws.

As he got older, Barnes switched to more traditional mediums, and was regularly found sketching. As he grew, Barnes eventually filled out to a daunting 6-foot, 3-inch height and was encouraged by coaches to pursue football as a means to further his education. In 1956, he enrolled at North Carolina College (a historically all-Black college and now North Carolina Central University) on a football scholarship, though he continued to study art. His time at NCC would prove pivotal to his artistic pursuits. At the instruction of one of his professors, renowned sculptor Ed Wilson, Barnes began to paint from his own life experiences of playing sports.

As his college years progressed, football became his primary focus, culminating in Barnes being drafted by the Baltimore Colts in December 1959. Over the course of his six-year career in the NFL, he played for four teams, including the San Diego Chargers and the Denver Broncos. When asked how playing sports influenced his artistic practice, Barnes noted, "For me, they were both integrating experiences. The disciplines of one are the disciplines of the other. I paid attention to how the body felt like in movement and my effort has been to translate that feeling onto paper or canvas." (E. Barnes, quoted in: "Interview with Ernie Barnes," The Soul Museum, August 2006). Interpreting the flexing of muscles and the movement of the human form onto canvas, High Aspirations is the architype for Barnes's basketball paintings, being the basis on which he would build his astounding career in the arts.

A theme within Ernie Barnes' oeuvre is his exploration and portrayal of people pursuing their passions to the point of transcendence. These portraits regularly capture a moment of uninterruptable grace for the subject, wherein they are completely absorbed by the task at hand and oblivious to the outside world. Sometimes he would capture these people in large groups with several people simultaneously experiencing the divine, though it is his more intimate works with a lone figure that are the most poignant and emotionally rich. Throughout his career, Barnes explored many different activities that could stir such feelings within the sitter, including music, religion, and family, but none can surpass the vitality of the canvas' exploring how sports can completely enrapture the soul, particularly basketball.

In High Aspirations, Barnes has mirrored the verticality of the leaping figure with a strikingly vertical canvas and infused the player with dynamic energy and graceful motion, focusing on his skills of modeling of the human form within a tightly controlled composition. Here Barnes has utilized his signature stretching of the limbs of the player to infuse the figure with a wiry vitality, a common ailment for the young man in the throes of adolescence, having achieved the height of a grown man, but not yet filled out with a muscular frame. Set against a cloudless sky, a barefoot figure has just launched himself skyward off his true left leg with his toes pointing downwards, as he stretches his right arm up toward the basket, ball firmly in his control as he attempts to dunk the ball into the twisting, makeshift hoop. As he leaps upward, the figure tilts his head back to ensure that the ball reaches its intended target. In the foreground, Barnes has mirrored the figure and makeshift hoop through the rendering of shadows, which act as a visual counterbalance and draw the eye back down. Planted firmly between the figure and his goal, there is a simple farmhouse in the distance. This could be a metaphor for the figure both emotionally and physically distancing himself from the rest of the world, where he can focus solely on playing the game to his heart's content. Focused on an individual playing by himself, High Aspirations is a masterful study in figural composition and form.

Singer, actor, and civil rights activist Harry Belafonte, acquired this work from Heritage Gallery in Los Angeles in 1972, most likely at the gallery's display of Barnes' work in the inaugural exhibition of "The Beauty of the Ghetto." This exhibition would go on to travel across the country, though without this work, and spread Barnes' personal expressions of the life and struggles for people of color, which galvanized viewers to re-examine their lived experiences and how their communities responded to desegregation. This exhibition was immensely important to Barnes' reach to the American public, but his greatest exposure came from the inclusion of his paintings in the beloved television show Good Times. From 1974-9, most of the paintings that were supposed to have been done by the character J.J., were painted by Barnes, including his most famous work Sugar Shack. Barnes' involvement in Good Times extended beyond his paintings as he also did two bit-part appearances on the show. Ernie Barnes was able to break through so many barriers throughout his life and his work is a celebration of the exuberance with which he approached everyday life and his paintings provided visibility for many at a time when representation was hardly a priority.

High Aspirations remained in Mr. Belafonte's collection for many decades, until he passed it to his son. The present owner acquired the work directly from Mr. Belafonte's son and this work has not been on the market in over 50 years, though it is one of the most reproduced images from Barnes' impressive repertoire of paintings.