Fondazione Prada Brings America's Two Most Radical Image Makers to Venice

Arthur Jafa and Richard Prince have never shared an exhibition. Born a decade apart, they have spent their careers working in parallel. Both image scavengers, both trafficking in the visual noise of America, both converting what they take without permission into art by choice alone. This Venice Biennale Arte, running from from May 9 to November 23, 2026, Fondazione Prada brings them together for the first time.

Titled Helter Skelter, and will be hold at Ca' Corner della Regina, the Maison's Grand Canal palazzo in Santa Croce. Curated by Nancy Spector, former Artistic Director of the Guggenheim Museum, the Exhibition will define the conversation at every dinner table during preview week.

Ca' Corner della Regina was built between 1724 and 1728 by Domenico Rossi on the ruins of the Gothic palace where Caterina Cornaro, future queen of Cyprus, was born in 1454. Its facade of Istrian stone has overlooked the Grand Canal for three centuries. Since 2011 it has been Fondazione Prada's Venice home. Within these walls, ten major exhibitions have taken place. Helter Skelter is the eleventh. It may be the most consequential.

Two Image Scavengers, One Unflinching Portrait of America

Jafa's practice reflects his identity as an African American man and his mission to invigorate Black cinema and art. His work moves between film, video and installation to examine the image of Blackness in American culture. Its erasure, its commodification, its power and its grief. Prince operates differently. His appropriations, of nurse romance novels, biker culture, celebrity photographs, social media posts, hover between a self-conscious critique of white masculinity and a deep, unsettled fascination with the underbelly of the American psyche. The two practices could not look more different. Yet Spector identified something essential connecting them: both cite Marcel Duchamp's readymade as a reference point. In his shift from making to taking, Duchamp modeled a kind of artistic piracy. That piracy constitutes the very DNA of both Jafa's and Prince's methodologies.

Over fifty works unfold across the ground and first floor of Ca' Corner della Regina through a series of thematic and conceptual juxtapositions. Photographs, videos, installations, sculptures and paintings. New commissions from each artist. And a collaboratively conceived zine, incorporating images exchanged between Jafa and Prince during the process of making this exhibition. That zine matters. It makes public, for the first time, a long-running creative conversation between two artists who have been in dialogue for years without anyone knowing.

What the Exhibition produces, in Spector's words, is an exposé. A country tarnished by its history of slavery. A country defined by musical traditions rooted in Black culture. A country of protest and subcultures and humor and celebrity. Jafa and Prince are quintessentially American artists. Yet it takes a Grand Canal palazzo in Venice, in the context of the world's oldest international art exhibition, to finally place their practices side by side and let the full picture emerge.

A Title That Carries the Full Weight of Its Own History

Helter Skelter began as a British fairground ride. It became a colloquialism for chaos. In 1968, Paul McCartney wrote it as a song for The White Album. Later that year, Charles Manson appropriated the term to predict an apocalyptic race war between Black and white Americans. In 1992, the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles used it as the title of an exhibition that notably excluded Black visual artists. The word arrives at Ca' Corner della Regina in 2026 carrying all of that history simultaneously. It is an unruly readymade. Selected by both artists as the title of their joint exhibition. A perfect expression of what the show sets out to do: disrupt, complicate, refuse resolution.

This Exhibition asks you to look. To sit with contradiction. To let the images — appropriated, manipulated, weaponized, reclaimed — do what images do when two artists with nothing to prove place them in the same room together for the first time. Ca' Corner della Regina has never held anything quite like it.

Fondazione Prada -Helter Skelter: Arthur Jafa and Richard Prince

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