See inside Luna Luna, the can’t-miss forgotten art carnival reborn in NYC
As I stepped inside Dalidom this week, a trippy mirrored dome designed by Salvador Dalí, I overheard someone gazing at the ceiling and asking, “Where am I? I’m trying to find myself.” While he was, no doubt, speaking literally about seeking his own image in the mirrored panels surrounding us, his question seemed to scratch at the meaning of Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy.
Over and over as I walked through Luna Luna, the world’s first art amusement park making its NYC debut, I felt gleefully unmoored. I watched as a Keith Haring-designed carousel whirred to life. I stumbled through a Roy Lichtenstein-created glass labyrinth. I danced with strangers inside David Hockney’s Enchanted Tree. Where am I? How is this real? Who am I in this place and what will I take from it when I leave? The exhibition feels both joyfully nostalgic and yet mysteriously foreign, a gobsmacking experience brought to life at The Shed in Manhattan after decades of dormancy. Luna Luna is, hands down, the coolest art exhibition to open in New York City this year, and it’s on view through January 5, 2025 with tickets starting at $44/person.
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Back in 1987, an artist and peace activist named André Heller hosted Luna Luna for the first time in Hamburg, Germany. That summer, the experience delighted 300,000 visitors with an avant-garde art amusement park created by big-name artists like Sonia Delaunay alongside then up-and-comers like Jean-Michel Basquiat. Delaunay’s geometric entrance greeted visitors at Luna Luna. Basquiat designed a Ferris wheel accompanied by Miles Davis’s 1986 song “Tutu.” Kenny Scharf created a technicolor chair swing ride. Heller himself built a wedding chapel where anybody could get married to anybody else—a radical political act in the 1980s when marriage was restricted to heterosexual couples.
“So how did I convince them? It was so simple. I can hardly believe it,” Heller has said about convincing the artists to work with him. “I asked everyone the same questions: Have you ever been a child? Yes. As a child, did you visit an amusement park? Yes. Did you like it? Yes.”
Have you ever been a child? Yes. As a child, did you visit an amusement park? Yes. Did you like it? Yes.
Heller dreamed of a world tour for his riotous fun house, but that never happened thanks to difficulty finding a permanent home for Luna Luna and long legal battles. The installations ended up abandoned in 44 giant shipping containers that found their way to America. In the Texas desert, the artworks sat like a time capsule while wasps made nests on the shipping containers’ exteriors.
For the most part, the park escaped the knowledge of the art world, with very little written about it during its forgotten decades. Eventually, entrepreneur Michael Goldberg tracked down the shipping containers, and they were purchased sight unseen by famed rapper Drake. The newly formed Luna Luna team spent two years rebuilding the pieces to revive the world tour that Heller dreamed of.
Though modern-day moguls sculpted Luna Luna into the immersive experience on view today, they kept the experience as close to the original as possible. While you can’t actually ride on the carousel or chair swing, you can step inside several installations and also experience pop-up puppeteering, dancing and even weddings. As performers rove through the space, it’s tough to know who is in on the act and who is a regular guest like you—and that’s part of the fun.
As Heller once said: “Art should come in unconventional guises and be brought to those who might not ordinarily seek it out in more predictable settings.”
Art should come in unconventional guises and be brought to those who might not ordinarily seek it out in more predictable settings.
The exhibit also digs into the history of Luna Luna. Heller told ARTnews that the purpose of Luna Luna was to use art and imagination to survive and fight back against an endangered world—a message that resounds deeply today. There’s a strong anti-fascist tone at Luna Luna. It was first created in the post-World War II period, a time when art was a powerful tool for questioning society’s values. Just decades earlier, Nazis closed and demolished Berlin’s Luna Park in 1933-34. A few years later in 1937-41, the Nazi Party hosted an exhibit called “Degenerate Art” discrediting Modernist and Jewish artists.
As a rebuke of Adolf Hitler’s Reich Chancellery, a symbol of Nazi power, artist Daniel Spoerri created the Crap Chancellery near the bathrooms at Luna Luna. The artist’s design featured columns topped with sculptures of, well, crap. He even hid generators inside the columns to create steam from the piles of poo. The artist’s grim humor and anti-fascism reflect his own loss; his Jewish father was murdered by Nazis in World War II. You can see the columns from Crap Chancellery in the New York City exhibition.
There was a lot of serious intent around reclaiming a childhood that they did not get to have in the postwar period.
“It was not all just fun and joy,” curatorial director Lumi Tan previously told Time Out. “There was a lot of serious intent around reclaiming a childhood that they did not get to have in the postwar period.”
For more than three decades, Luna Luna’s messages sat dormant, hidden behind layers of metal in the desert. Now, we have the opportunity to see these important and joyful works once again—don’t miss the chance to step right up into this circus world where art and play coexist.