An original Basquiat Ferris wheel and a Keith Haring carousel are two of the high-art-meets-fairground attractions coming to New York this fall when Luna Luna, the once lost art carnival, travels to the Shed in Hudson Yards.
After languishing in a rural Texas warehouse, Luna Luna was rescued and restored thanks to intervention from the rapper Drake. Its first exhibition — no, you can’t ride the rides — opened in Los Angeles in December.
Originally conceived by the avant-garde Austrian artist André Heller, Luna Luna was inspired by local carnivals (called “luna parks” outside of the United States) and opened in Hamburg, Germany, in the summer of 1987.
Participating artists included Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Salvador Dalí, David Hockney, Sonia Delaunay, Roy Lichtenstein and Kenny Scharf, who either decorated vintage carnival equipment or created their own works for the pavilions.
In 1990, after a potential European tour and plans for the city of Vienna to buy Luna Luna fell through, Heller agreed to sell the project to the Stephen and Mary Birch Foundation. That decision set off decades of litigation over rights concerns and disputes on charging admission, and left Luna Luna untouched until its 2022 rescue.
Anthony Gonzales, the chief executive of Luna Luna and a partner in Drake’s DreamCrew, the rapper’s all-purpose business entity for creative projects, said the mix of avant-garde art and pop culture that is manifested in Luna Luna made it approachable to newcomers, as a sort of “Trojan horse” for gallery novices.
“New York is the capital of the art world,” he said. “We really saw that this was the true big moment.”
Michael Goldberg, the founder of Something Special Studios and the chief experience and creative officer of the team that helped resurrect Luna Luna, said coming to New York made sense because of the roots that artists like Basquiat, Haring and Scharf have in the city.
“For so many of the artists, this is really where they in some cases grew up, but for a lot of them it’s where their art careers really took off,” he said.
Luna Luna will be sprawled across both the Shed’s gallery and its adjoining plaza, which can be transformed into a performance space with 115 feet of vertical clearance when it is covered by a movable outer shell. That height is important to accommodate some of the exhibition’s taller works, like the Basquiat Ferris wheel, which almost kissed the ceiling in its temporary home in Los Angeles.
“There’s just such a close match between the animating philosophy of the Shed and this exhibition, in that it is the work of world-class artists in its most appealing and inviting format,” said Max Hodges, the Shed’s chief executive.
Luna Luna will open to the public on Nov. 20 and be a centerpiece of the Shed’s 2024-2025 season programming, which includes a production of Shakespeare’s “King Lear” anchored by Kenneth Branagh; a one-night performance of the Brooklyn-based rapper Ms. Boogie’s debut album, “The Breakdown”; and a staging of “The Brothers Size,” a play by Tarell Alvin McCraney, who wrote the play “Moonlight” and co-wrote its screenplay adaptation.
Alex Poots, the artistic director at the Shed, said the cultural alchemy of bringing the highest-quality work to the widest range of people was part of Heller’s original intention for Luna Luna.
“Heller took the fairground as a format to commission some of the most important artists of the second half of the 20th century,” Poots said. “He not only maintained the quality of the artistry, but found many, many doorways and windows for audiences from all walks of life to come in.”
One undeniable pop culture doorway into Luna Luna is now Drake, whose DreamCrew is the majority investor. But visitors hoping to sneak in a celebrity sighting might be disappointed. When asked if the star might make an appearance, Gonzales was tight-lipped.
“We’ll see,” he said.
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