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Stephen Prina: A Lick and a Promise
September–December 2025
The Museum of Modern Art
For the past four decades, American visual artist, musician, and composer Stephen Prina has developed a unique, irreverent approach to reference and representation in his installations, films, and musical performances. Drawing on tropes of conceptualism, modernism, and institutional critique, Prina frequently brings together networks of pre-existing materials, intermixing popular and elite culture—a Joni Mitchell song, Robert Bresson films, Glenn Gould recordings, the paintings of Édouard Manet—rearranging and re-representing them in different exhibition contexts to surface new meanings and associations.
While previous exhibitions of Prina’s work have primarily highlighted his visual arts practice, Stephen Prina: A Lick and a Promise will be the first exhibition to focus in depth on the artist’s performances, drawing out a central factor in Prina’s wider project: time and the temporal dimensions of cultural systems. Unfolding across multiple locations in the Museum, including the Kravis Studio, the robust performance survey includes restagings of historic works such as Sonic Dan (1994) and new works such as A Lick and a Promise (2025), an orchestral commission for 16 instruments plus voice.
More details and performance schedule to be announced.
Organized by Stuart Comer, The Lonti Ebers Chief Curator of Media and Performance, with May Makki, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Media and Performance. Produced by Lizzie Gorfaine, Associate Director and Producer, and Kate Scherer, Senior Manager and Producer, with Nora Chellew, and Olivia Rousey, Assistant Performance Coordinators, Performance and Live Programs.
Media and performance at MoMA are presented through a partnership with Richard Mille.
Leadership support for the exhibition is provided by the Lonti Ebers Endowment for Performance.
Major funding is provided by the Wallis Annenberg Director’s Fund for Innovation in Contemporary Art, the Sarah Arison Endowment Fund for Performance, and the Julie A. Zoppo Fund for the Exhibition of Women Artists.
Images
Stephen Prina. The Top Thirteen Singles from Billboard’s Hot 100 Singles Chart for the Week Ending September 11, 1993. 1993, Courtesy of the artist and Petzel, New York
Stephen Prina. Vinyl II (Still). 2000. Courtesy of the artist and Petzel, New York