The exhibition “Helter Skelter: Arthur Jafa and Richard Prince” opened this past Saturday, 9 May, at Fondazione Prada in Venice. Curated by Nancy Spector, it runs until 23 November 2026.
Arthur Jafa – Big Wheel II, 2018 © Arthur Jafa
The show brings together two American artists whose work has never been examined side by side before. Arthur Jafa, born in 1960, and Richard Prince, born in 1949, share an approach to images that ignores the usual rules. Both lift and manipulate material from movies, pulp novels, comic books, YouTube videos, sci-fi stories, album covers, record sleeves, rock posters, first-edition Beat volumes, news reels, celebrity memorabilia, and social media posts. They traffic in American popular culture, exposing its grit and its cons while also embracing many of its myths. Each artist maps a specific American landscape. Jafa’s reflects his identity as an African American man and his commitment to invigorating Black cinema and art. Prince hovers between a critique of white masculinity and a fascination with the darker corners of the American psyche.
Richard Prince Untitled (Sunsets) (detail), 1981-82 © Richard Prince
The exhibition features more than fifty works, including photographs, videos, installations, sculptures, and paintings. It also includes new pieces by each artist and a zine they made together, which incorporates images they exchanged while developing the show.
Arthur Jafa Man Monster–Duffy, 2018 © Arthur Jafa
Spread across the ground and first floor of the Venetian palazzo, “Helter Skelter” arranges works by both artists in thematic and conceptual pairings. The juxtapositions illuminate their individual practices and draw out shared subjects and mutual obsessions. Spector describes the elective affinities between them as rooted in a particular American vernacular: a country marked by its history of slavery, defined by musical traditions born from Black culture, a place of doing without but making good, of spirit and prayer and free expression, of protest and subcultures and humor and celebrity.
Arthur Jafa – akingdoncomethas, 2018 © Arthur Jafa
An illustrated book accompanies the exhibition, published by Fondazione Prada and designed by Peter Saville with Graphic Thought Facility. It includes an introduction by Miuccia Prada, a conversation between Jafa and Prince, an essay by Nancy Spector, and critical texts by scholars and writers including Beth Coleman, Ashon Crawley, Aria Dean, Jack Halberstam, Ernest Hardy, Ashley James, Randy Kennedy, Martin Lund, Dorian Lynskey, Greil Marcus, Amy Taubin, and Peter Watts. Both artists also created individual photographic sections for the book. It is available in the new “Dispense” series, which reprints selected Fondazione catalogues in a medium format, in black and white.
