The Spiritual American Pavilion

the title on a brochure that says fondazione prada helter skelter arthur jafa and richard prince
The brochure is tall. If there were any plebeians in Venice rn, the show would open for them Saturday

I have read the gallery guide for Helter Skelter Arthur Jafa and Richard Prince, Miuccia Prada’s two-artist show curated by Nancy Spector. I have created a mind palace and walked through it. I’m not sure these artists are operating on the same register.

The exhibition segregates them on the ground floor, and they get together in the fancy rooms upstairs. Spector notes shared ideas, themes, visuals, approaches, without forcing too hard. It feels more like parallel play than direct engagement or dialogue. [Which makes me very interested to see what Jafa and Prince’s collaborative zine ends up like; it could be the song of the summer.]

The image used to promote the show feels like its apotheosis. Prince’s iconic Rasta painting, Graduation (2008) and a Vodoun witch doctor from Jafa’s Mickey Mouse Was A Scorpio (2019) are shown side by side, along with two other Canal Zone paintings, near the end of the show. In the text, Spector focuses on appropriation and juxtaposition, and Jafa’s critique of ownership in the historical context of chattel slavery.

an arthur jafa artwork with a black and white line drawing of mickey mouse next to a mostly black and white photo of a vodoun priest with whiteface resembling a skull, or mickey mouse, and wearing a light suit jacket, is stacked on top of a pairing of the same vodoun priest image and a richard prince painting of a rasta playing a guitar, mostly black and white with blue ovals over his face, in ways that resemble the whiteface next to it. this is the promotional image for the prada foundation's show of these two artists' work in venice in 2026
[top] Arthur Jafa’s Mickey Mouse Was A Scorpio, 2019, at Museum Brandhorst… cropped and combined [bottom] with Richard Prince’s Graduation, 2008, for the Prada Foundation show.

But the elision of Mickey Mouse feels crucial. Jafa has talked about how placing their images next to each other reveal Mickey and Damballah, the Vodoun spirit represented by the witch doctor, are two iterations of the same entity. Placing a whiteface figure next to Prince’s Rasta says blackface, without the hard “R.” But hanging Mickey next to Graduation brings out the minstrel in both.

The autobiography of desire echoes throughout the show, with each artist exploring the yearning of being someone else, an other. Prince made his Girlfriends photos because he “wanted to be a girlfriend.” And Jafa’s Man-Monster self-portrait embodies transformation in ways that resonate with his 2024 race-switching re-edit of Taxi Driver, BG, which in Venice is titled Ben Gazarra [is the misspelling intentional?].

the poorly lit gallery in a venetian palazzo has an arthur jafa work with a large black and white photo of a vodoun priest in a suit with whiteface printed on aluminum next to an ornate doorway, where a video of a black gospel choir is projected on the far wall, and to the right of the doorway is a richard prince painting of four dark ovals on a painterly white ground, in such a way that it looks like the cartoon face of mickey mouse.
installation view of Helter Skelter so that Mickey’s cropped out again, but that surprised Mickey face-like group of ovals isn’t. image: Fond. Prada via hypebeast, which I only read for the google images

What’s less clear, perhaps, in the show is that Prince testified that painting Rastas was an act of love, of desire, of substitution like the Girlfriends: he wanted to look like them, to be them. For all the real talk of the Black experience, white supremacy, and American masculinity, I feel like both of these artists are mapping the psychosexual contours of a violent, white, imperialist, colonialist elephant, while Spector and Prada are maybe saying, keep the blindfolds on.