Fondazione Prada will present Helter Skelter: Arthur Jafa and Richard Prince at its Venice space during the 2026 Venice Art Biennale, opening to the public on 9th May and running through 23rd November 2026. Curated by Nancy Spector, former Artistic Director of the Guggenheim Museum, the exhibition brings two of America’s most influential image-makers into direct dialogue for the first time.
Born a decade apart, Jafa and Prince share a restless, lawless approach to image-making, freely drawing on movies, music, pulp fiction, advertising, social media, and mass culture. Both traffic in the visual noise of America — its myths, contradictions and obsessions — exposing its grit while amplifying its seductions.
Jafa’s work is shaped by his experience as a Black American and his mission to reimagine the language of Black cinema and visual culture. Prince, by contrast, operates in the uneasy space between critique and complicity, probing the fantasies, violence and anxieties embedded in white masculinity, celebrity and American mythology.
The exhibition will unfold through a series of thematic juxtapositions, pairing works by both artists in ways that “illuminate each of their practices and tease out shared subject matter and mutual obsessions.” The installation will also make public a long-running creative conversation between Jafa and Prince that has never before been presented in exhibition form.
Set against the charged backdrop of the Venice Biennale, Helter Skelter positions two radically different but deeply intertwined practices face-to-face — offering a sharp, volatile portrait of the American image economy as seen from both inside and at its edges.
Helter Skelter: Arthur Jafa and Richard Prince, 9th May – 23rd November 2026, Ca’ Corner della Regina
