{"id":1925263,"date":"2026-05-08T15:58:14","date_gmt":"2026-05-08T12:58:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1925263"},"modified":"2026-05-08T15:58:14","modified_gmt":"2026-05-08T12:58:14","slug":"a-fondazione-prada-exhibition-pairs-arthur-jafa-and-richard-prince","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1925263","title":{"rendered":"A Fondazione Prada Exhibition Pairs Arthur Jafa and Richard Prince"},"content":{"rendered":"

[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/10-FP_Helter-Skelter.jpg?w=1024″]<\/p>\n

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\n\tWhat is appropriate to appropriate? That question is the one that animates practices of Richard Prince and Arthur Jafa, who are currently showing their work together at the Fondazione Prada in Venice. \u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tAt first glance, the pairing might seem like an unconventional one, even though both artists are well known for appropriating others\u2019 images. \u201cI\u2019m surprised that people are surprised,\u201d Jafa told me in a video interview ahead of the exhibition. \u201cI think it\u2019s pretty apparent that a large part of what I do, at least inside the art world, just wouldn\u2019t be possible without Richard\u2019s precedent.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThey are both absolutely scavengers for and collectors of images from every possible source,\u201d Nancy Spector, the exhibition\u2019s curator, said in a recent interview. \u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tJafa and Prince met during the debut exhibition of Jafa\u2019s AGHDRA<\/em> (2021), a video of an ocean made of digital rocks that premiered that year at Gavin Brown\u2019s Enterprise in Harlem. Jafa thought Prince might just come to watch about 10\u201315 minutes, but Prince stayed in the gallery for the film\u2019s entire 75-minute run. \u201cI was flabbergasted,\u201d Jafa said. \u201cHe turned to me at the end and just said, \u2018That was incredible. Let\u2019s keep in touch.\u2019 Then, he just walked off into the darkness.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThen, about three years ago, Spector did a studio visit with Jafa, who spoke about Prince\u2019s work, an interest of Jafa\u2019s since the \u201990s. Spector said she initially \u201cdidn\u2019t understand why,\u201d thinking this perhaps had to do with Prince\u2019s 2007 retrospective at the Guggenheim, which she had curated. \u201cWhen I pressed him on it, he spoke about appropriation and theft, and how his engagement as a Black man was very different from Prince\u2019s, in the sense of taking property, in the fact that African Americans were historically property themselves. It became quite an interesting conversation.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAfter the visit, Spector found a video produced by the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark, made in tandem with a 2022 survey of Prince\u2019s work there, in which five artists spoke on Prince\u2019s influence. In it, Jafa says, \u201cHe is clearly the blackest white artist I know.\u201d That statement \u201cprompted an exercise of looking at the two works together and coming to understand that AJ had been also appropriating Richard\u2019s work as a kind of homage to Richard\u2019s practice,\u201d she said. Jafa told me that the statement was mostly a joke, but the truth in it lies in Prince\u2019s \u201cantagonistic relationship to things like property values.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Richard Prince\u2019s Untitled<\/em> (2018\u201320, foreground) and his The Entertainers<\/em> (1982\u201383) sit across from\u00a0Arthur Jafa\u2019s Viriconium<\/em> (2026) in \u201cHelter Skelter.\u201d<\/span>Photo Andrea Rossetti\/Courtesy Fondazione Prada<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tFor Jafa, artists like Prince and Sherrie Levine developed strategies around appropriation that make work like his possible through \u201can affirmation that one can operate with strategies that don\u2019t necessarily coincide with normative ideas of how you\u2019re supposed to operate as an artist,\u201d he said. \u201cThe thing is to take the impulse and realize that you can be self-authorizing. The question of self-authorizing, certainly for Black artists, but for Black people in general, I think that\u2019s probably\u2014outside of freedom\u2014the existential preoccupation. You can\u2019t be self-determined if you\u2019re not free.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tBut whereas Levine, in appropriating the work of artists like Walker Evans, took appropriation to \u201ca sort of final conclusion, in a way,\u201d in Prince, Jafa sees an approach in which appropriation is \u201cextended toward the cultural and ephemeral.\u201d Jafa and Prince are bound by a set of interests: \u201coutsider culture, working-class culture, rebel culture, culture that is not necessarily functioning inside of bourgeois values.\u201d (Marcel Duchamp looms large in both artists\u2019 practices, Jafa said. \u201cI think Richard is a person, more than anybody else, who figured out some of the singular things that are on the other side of the readymade.\u201d)<\/p>\n

\n\tJafa has also appropriated Prince\u2019s work in his own art, which he said is \u201cjust play. I\u2019m not really interested in critiquing stuff in general, you know what I mean? If I appropriate or delve into anybody\u2019s work, first and foremost, it\u2019s because I like it, I like what they do.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tIn a free-ranging interview with Jafa that\u2019s published in the exhibition\u2019s catalog, Prince discusses his influences and his approach to art-making, concluding with the statement: \u201cArtists are always faced with\u2014especially if you\u2019re an idea-oriented artist\u2014the question of where the line [in the sand] is. You can step back and draw another. \u2026 Once I reach my line in the sand, I step back, I draw another line.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAs their friendship developed organically over the past few years, Jafa and Prince began texting each other, exchanging images in the process. That exchange now forms the basis of a zine by the two artists. \u201cI\u2019m just constantly sending people things I\u2019m thinking about, things I think are interesting, really anything,\u201d Jafa said. \u201cIt just started like that, with me and Richard. I don\u2019t think it was anything. There\u2019s been a certain interest in us \u2018collaborating,\u2019 but both of us are a little contrarian, so I kept saying, \u2018Yeah, when the show\u2019s over, we\u2019ll make something together.\u201d<\/p>\n

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From left: Arthur Jafa\u2019s The White Album<\/em> (2018) and two of Richard Prince\u2019s \u201cWhite Paintings,\u201d Future<\/em> (1992) and Untitled<\/em> (1990), installation view, in \u201cHelter Skelter.\u201d <\/span>Photo Andrea Rossetti\/Courtesy Fondazione Prada<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

As Spector began to conceive of the exhibition\u2019s juxtapositions<\/strong>, she began to see Prince\u2019s work differently. For example, she began to filter Prince\u2019s \u201cWhite Paintings,\u201d through the lens of Jafa\u2019s Golden Lion\u2013winning film The White Album<\/em> (2018), \u201cwhich looks at whiteness from the perspective of Blackness,\u201d she said. \u201cI\u2019d always understood the \u2018White Paintings\u2019 as being about a certain time and place and class, but I hadn\u2019t really considered race, even though the title \u2018white\u2019 is in the work.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe exhibition\u2019s title, \u201cHelter Skelter,\u201d points to that tension, which Spector, writing in her catalog essay, says \u201cis manifold in potential meaning, deliberately so.\u201d As she details in that essay, the phrase was the name of a British amusement park, then was adopted as \u201ca colloquialism for chaos or disorder\u201d and was made popular by a Beatles song (on their LP, The White Album<\/em>, no less) before being scrawled on the scene of the La Bianca murders in 1969 by the followers of Charles Manson, who believed the song \u201ccontained the coded prophecy of a coming race war.\u201d The phrase also lends its name to a landmark 1992 exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles\u2014one that glaringly did not include Black artists.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIt\u2019s an appropriation of an appropriation of an appropriation,\u201d Jafa told me. \u201cIt underlines what I see as one of the primary absences or elisions in the original show, and it\u2019s also to just being reckless, not playing nice. I don\u2019t think either one of us does things to shock people. I certainly don\u2019t. To a certain degree, I see it as a kind of truth-telling, trying to be truthful, unconstrained, and unmediated in terms of what I do creatively.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Arthur Jafa, Big Wheel II<\/em>, 2018, installation view, in \u201cHelter Skelter,\u201d 2026, at Fondazione Prada, Venice.<\/span>Photo Andrea Rossetti\/Courtesy Fondazione Prada<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tThe exhibition\u2019s juxtapositions\u2014or \u201cduets,\u201d as Spector calls them\u2014form the basis of the Prada exhibition. The show opens with a pairing of two large-scale works that she found \u201cinstructive\u201d in thinking of their work: two of Prince\u2019s 2006 Folk Songs (Blasting Mats)<\/em>, installed in the courtyard to the right of the entrance, and Jafa\u2019s Big Wheel II<\/em> (2018), just past the staircase and in the palazzo\u2019s portego<\/em>. She wanted to showcase how the two artists\u2019 artistic affinities extend beyond appropriation, noting how \u201cviolence [is] embedded in both their works. Monster trucks destroy other trucks. Blasting mats are containers for explosions, and they are very visceral, looking like hanging slabs of meat.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAlso located in a ground-floor gallery is Jafa\u2019s iconic Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death<\/em> (2016). Spector was most struck by its recurring motif of a burning sun, which appears about seven times in the course of the video\u2019s seven and a half minutes, and which also appears in other Jafa works, like APEX<\/em> (2013). In the Prada exhibition, Spector has installed Love Is the Message<\/em> in a black box on the ground floor, close to Prince\u2019s \u201cUntitled (Sunsets)\u201d photographs, from 1981\u201382. \u201cI began to think about this solar moment in both their works and this underpinning of dystopic fiction\u2014it\u2019s hard to put it exactly into words,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

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The blaring sun in Arthur Jafa\u2019s Love Is The Message, The Message Is Death<\/em> (2016), installation view, in \u201cHelter Skelter,\u201d 2026, at Fondazione Prada, Venice.<\/span>Photo Andrea Rossetti\/Courtesy Fondazione Prada<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tAnother juxtaposition that came to Spector early in the planning was Jafa\u2019s BEN GAZARRA<\/em>, which he recently retitled from *****<\/em> and which debuted two years ago, with Prince\u2019s Spiritual America <\/em>(1983), an image appropriated from a 1975 Gray Gross photograph, showing a nude, preteen Brooke Shields. BEN GAZARRA <\/em>shows, over the course of 72 minutes, slight variations of the climax of Martin Scorsese\u2019s Taxi Driver<\/em> (1976), in which the main character, Travis Bickle, shoots up a brothel to free Iris (Jodie Foster), a 12-year-old being sex trafficked. In Jafa\u2019s version, however, the men he encounters to free Iris, including her pimp Sport, have been changed to Black actors, which draws from Scorsese\u2019s original script but was ultimately changed to prevent protests against the film for being seen as anti-Black.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn this pairing, Spector draws a connection to both works\u2019 focus on a young girl. The point, though, Spector made clear wasn\u2019t to highlight the \u201ctitillating, pedophilic aspects [to both works], because that\u2019s not of any interest to this exhibition,\u201d she said, rather it was about \u201cthe fact that both artists have spoken about releasing the subliminal narrative from an image or a moving image.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tJafa, who says he first conceived of BEN GAZARRA<\/em> in the 1990s in his interview with Prince, described that pairing as \u201cthe most genius idea that Nancy had\u2014that\u2019s a mic drop. \u2026 That\u2019s Nancy at her best, conceptually. That was not a juxtaposition that had ever occurred to me, but it\u2019s so obvious. As a gesture, you get it immediately, but it\u2019s not on the nose either.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Arthur Jafa\u2019s BEN GAZARRA<\/em> (2024) screens to the left of Alfred Stieglitz\u2019s Spiritual America<\/em> (1923), in \u201cHelter Skelter,\u201d 2026, installation view.<\/span>Photo Andrea Rossetti\/Courtesy Fondazione Prada<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tPrince\u2019s Spiritual America<\/em> is not included in the exhibition, as it is classified as child pornography and would be illegal to show in Italy. In its place is Alfred Stieglitz\u2019s Spiritual America<\/em> (1923), showing the hindquarters of a harnessed horse, from which Prince appropriated the title and now owns. \u201cOne can no longer really show Spiritual America<\/em> anymore,\u201d Spector conceded. Nonetheless, \u201cit\u2019s stepped away from the pairing I hoped to make, but it\u2019s definitely in the trajectory in explaining the history of the title.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tElsewhere in the exhibition, are pairings like a new installation of cardboard cutouts, titled Viriconium<\/em>, by Jafa, with Prince\u2019s The Entertainers <\/em>(1982\u201383), 11 large-scale Ektacolor photographs showing aspiring actors who found work in the seediness of \u201980s Times Square, and his Untitled<\/em> (2018\u201320), a bronze-cast rendition of a silver-chrome motorcycle; Prince\u2019s \u201cde Kooning Paintings\u201d (2006) with Jafa\u2019s 2018 photograph Man Monster-Duffy, a self-portrait of sorts in which the artist poses Mary Jones, a 19th-century Black trans sex worker; and a room showing multi-panel photo assemblages by both artists. Through it all, what becomes most apparent is the threads that connect one work to another in each artist\u2019s practice, and ultimately what connects both artists to each other.<\/p>\n

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Installation view of \u201cHelter Skelter: Arthur Jafa and Richard Prince,\u201d 2026, at Fondazione Prada, Venice.<\/span>Photo Andrea Rossetti\/Courtesy Fondazione Prada<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tAs with her past exhibitions, Spector hopes that \u201cHelter Skelter\u201d will \u201cinvite a certain level of rethinking of the artists\u2019 respective practices.\u201d Part of that might be in part because of the setting of the Fondazione Prada\u2019s Venice space, a 18th-century palazzo that was built on the ruins of a Gothic structure and sits on the Grand Canal. Early on, Peter Seville, the designer of the exhibition\u2019s visuals and catalog, \u201cpointed out that the building itself is almost the third party, and we decided to approach it as the interlocutor,\u201d Spector said, noting that that third character extends to the book, in which reproductions of both artists\u2019 work are placed over full-bleed images of different interior shots of the palazzo. \u201cThere is a real interest in the fact that these are two very American artists whose work is steeped in American culture in an environment that is the opposite of that.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAhead of the exhibition\u2019s opening, Jafa wasn\u2019t sure how visitors might receive the exhibition, especially given that some might see his admiration for Prince\u2019s work as unconventional, even if disparate references mining the whole of American culture are part and parcel to his practice. \u201cI\u2019m very aware that there are these ideas about what one might expect from a Black artist,\u201d he said. \u201cBut by the same token, I\u2019m not trying to make anything that\u2019s going to surprise anybody. I\u2019m not trying to do an unexpected gesture from a Black artist.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThinking about the state of the world in 2026, he concluded our interview by saying, \u201cOne of my favorite quips is: \u2018when it happens to white people, it\u2019s a dystopia; when it happens us, it\u2019s just life.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/10-FP_Helter-Skelter.jpg?w=1024″] What is appropriate to appropriate? That question is the one that animates practices of Richard Prince and Arthur Jafa, who are currently showing their work together at the Fondazione Prada in Venice. \u00a0 At first glance, the pairing might seem like an unconventional one, even though both artists are well known for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-1925263","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1925263","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1925263"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1925263\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1925263"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1925263"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1925263"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}