In wrestling lingo, a “house show” refers to a non-televised pro-wrestling event. It’s a dress rehearsal of sorts, used by organizers to test out match-ups and by wrestlers to experiment on lines and moves still being developed. For die-hard fans, it’s a chance to see the stars up close and away from the pressure of cameras.
The term has provided the title for the first comprehensive art exhibition in the U.S. dedicated to pro-wrestling. The house in question is the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, which in the Fall of 2027 will present “House Show: Power, Spectacle, and Pro Wrestling,” a show promising to take visitors inside the idiosyncratic world of wrestling.
Wrestling as a performing art may trace its roots to the touring European carnivals of the 19th century, but its modern counterpart is a quintessentially American affair: bombastic spectacle filled with larger-than-life characters and presented to audiences with the slickest of television production values. Its popularity boomed in the post-war years launching the so-called First Golden Age of professional wrestling in the U.S.
Thekla Kaischauri, Untitled (Women at the Garden) (2024). Photo: courtesy MFA St. Petersburg.
This is the starting point for “House Show” which continues up to the present (i.e. the Second Golden Age) through more than 50 works of painting, sculpture, video, photography, and performance. Pro-wrestling is a lens, the show’s curators Katherine Pill and Adam Abdalla told me, for investigating gender, sexuality, and the aesthetics of violence.
“The concept for this exhibition grew from an obsession with two seemingly disparate worlds: contemporary art and pro wrestling. It is a passion project brought to life,” Pill, the museum’s curator of contemporary art, said over email. “It features works from artists with in-ring experience and those who are more distanced from the pro-wrestling arena, both harnessing wrestling’s supercharged energy.”
Key to understanding the spectacle—and the exhibition—is the concept of kayfabe, a word of unclear origin that expresses the tacit agreement between the performers and their audience to treat the scripted as authentic. It’s a timely concept to consider in an era when authenticity seems fraught across social media, personal identity, and politics.
Florida’s Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg. Photo by Rosie Betancourt/Jeff Greenberg/Universal Images Group via Getty Images.
Fittingly, MFA St. Petersburg has tapped some real-life wrestlers for help. Lee Moriarty, Danny Havoc, and Thekla Kaischauri all offer up their artistic impressions of time spent inside the ring. Ahead of the exhibition, the museum has acquired Kaischauri’s (2024), a chaotic blur of two women grappling mid-match. Besides being an AEW professional wrestler, Kaischauri boasts an MFA from the University of Applied Arts Vienna and blends Viennese Expressionism with manga from Japan, a country she lived in for several years.
Elsewhere, the museum will bring together work by artists including Jeremy Deller, Shaun Leonardo, Jenna Gribbon, and Rosalyn Drexler, who have previously explored professional wrestling through art.
For the show’s other curator, Abdalla, wrestling has shifted from a personal obsession to a professional focus. He launched in 2020, a magazine that sits at the crossover of visual art and professional wrestling, and has seen its influence grow.
“The magazine was an editorial project about a subculture that many felt was niche and juxtapositional to art. Now, wrestling is so pervasive in culture,” Abdalla said over email. “Things come full circle. This art form is both absurd yet so oddly reflective of American life.”
“House Show” will be complemented by programming including live events and talks from both the art and wrestling communities.
Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com
