Overview

Fondazione Prada presents “Helter Skelter: Arthur Jafa and Richard Prince” at Ca’ Corner della Regina, its Venetian venue, from May 9 to November 23, 2026, coinciding with the 61st Venice Art Biennale (press previews May 6 to 8). The exhibition is curated by Nancy Spector, former Artistic Director of the Guggenheim Museum. It brings together more than fifty works spanning photographs, videos, installations, sculptures, and paintings by two of the most consequential American artists working today, and reveals a creative conversation between them that has never previously been examined as a subject of exhibition.

Arthur Jafa (b. 1960) and Richard Prince (b. 1949) are separated by a decade and by the very different social positions from which they encounter American visual culture: Jafa as an African American man with a sustained mission to reinvigorate Black cinema and art; Prince from a position that oscillates between self-conscious critique of white masculinity and an almost clinical fascination with the American psyche’s underbelly. Yet both have developed practices rooted in appropriation, image capture, and the conversion of found visual material into art by force of selection and context alone.

Focus

The exhibition’s curatorial logic rests on the argument that despite their different social positionalities and aesthetic registers, Jafa and Prince share a fundamental artistic DNA: both are image scavengers operating in the tradition of the Duchampian readymade, pulling from movies, pulp novels, comic books, YouTube videos, science fiction, album covers, record sleeves, rock and roll posters, first-edition Beat volumes, newsreels, celebrity memorabilia, and social media posts. Neither seeks permission. Both convert source material into art through the act of selection and displacement alone.

The exhibition also features new work by each artist and a collaboratively conceived zine incorporating images exchanged between the artists during the process of making the exhibition. The installation unfolds across the ground and first floor of the Venetian palazzo through a series of thematic and conceptual juxtapositions, combining works by both artists to illuminate each of their practices and surface shared subject matter and mutual obsessions.

What comes into focus through the refracting lens of Jafa’s and Prince’s appropriation-based practices is an unflinching exposé on America: a country forever tarnished by its history of slavery, defined by remarkable musical traditions rooted in Black culture, and characterized by protest, subcultures, humor, and celebrity.
Nancy Spector, Curator, 2026

The Title

The title “Helter Skelter” functions as a palimpsest of meanings. It originates as a British amusement park ride. It became a 1968 song by Paul McCartney on the White Album. In late 1968, cult leader Charles Manson appropriated it to predict an apocalyptic race war between Black and white Americans. It was also the title of a 1992 exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, which notably excluded Black visual artists. Reinvoked here, the term contains the full complexity and messiness of its misuse in popular culture: an unruly readymade selected by the artists themselves to disrupt expectations, and a precise expression of the composite, collision-prone nature of this two-person show.

Key Works

The Artists

Arthur Jafa

Arthur Jafa is a filmmaker, cinematographer, and visual artist whose practice centres on the relationship between Black music’s emotional and cultural intensity and the possibilities of Black visual image-making. He was Director of Photography on Julie Dash’s “Daughters of the Dust” (1991) and Spike Lee’s “Crooklyn” (1994). His 2016 video “Love is the Message, the Message is Death” brought his work to widespread international attention; ARTnews has described it as the best artwork of the 21st century so far. He participated in the 2019 Venice Biennale main exhibition curated by Ralph Rugoff.

Richard Prince

Richard Prince is a central figure of the Pictures Generation, the loosely grouped American artists who, from the late 1970s onward, appropriated and re-presented media images to interrogate the construction of desire, identity, and belief through mass culture. His Cowboys series, Nurse Paintings, and various celebrity and subcultural rephotography works have made him one of the most influential and legally controversial figures in late twentieth and early twenty-first century American art. He participated in the 2003 Venice Biennale. He is represented by Galerie Max Hetzler among others.

Curator

Nancy Spector is a curator and critic who served as Artistic Director and Chief Curator of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. Her practice centres on contemporary American and European art with particular attention to questions of identity, politics, and appropriation. The Helter Skelter pairing is consistent with her long-standing curatorial interest in artists who use popular culture as critical raw material.

Content Note

Fondazione Prada has noted that the exhibition includes artworks featuring explicit and potentially disturbing content, including scenes of violence, nudity, and sexual imagery. Adults are advised to consider these factors before visiting with minors.

Event Details