Art From Thekla And Lee Moriarty To Be Featured At Museum of Fine Arts In St. Petersburg
Thekla, Lee Moriarty, and more wrestlers will have art featured at the Museum of Fine Arts In St. Petersburg.
The exhibit, called House Show, will open in Fall 2027.
From Orange Crush:
In Fall 2027, the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg will proudly present:
House Show: Power, Spectacle, and Pro Wrestling
This is the first expansive U.S. museum exhibition to examine the crossover between contemporary art and professional wrestling, presenting more than 50 works spanning painting, sculpture, video, photography, and performance.
House Show brings together work made by performers themselves, including Thekla Kaischauri, Lee Moriarty, and Danny Havoc (Grant Berkland). This work is shown alongside key works by established artists—Jeremy Deller, Shaun Leonardo, Jenna Gribbon, Rosalyn Drexler, and many more—who have created pieces that explore professional wrestling.
The exhibition will feature Untitled (Women at the Garden) by artist and AEW professional wrestler Thekla Kaischauri, the latest acquisition by the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg. Born in Austria in 1993, Kaischauri explores the intensity of bodily gesture through painting, informed by Viennese Expressionism, Japanese manga, and the physical theater of the ring. Untitled (Women at the Garden) depicts two women mid-match, capturing the layered performance of aggression, grace, and spectacle. As the artist’s first institutional acquisition, the work also expands the museum’s collection of gestural abstraction by women artists and signals a bold new direction for engaging performative practices in contemporary art.
The show highlights how wrestling’s unique mix of theater, fiction, and reality resonates with contemporary art, drawing on themes of identity, gender performance, spectacle, and ritualized violence and care.
The exhibition is co-curated by Katherine Pill, MFA St. Petersburg’s Senior Curator of Contemporary Art, and Adam Abdalla, founder of Orange Crush: The Journal of Art & Wrestling.
Fans can learn more here.
