Arch Connelly: Straighten Your Wig and Pray

In summer 2026, Aspen Art Museum will present the first museum survey dedicated to the work of Arch Connelly (1950–1993), a Chicago-born artist who emerged as a vibrant figure within New York’s East Village art scene of the 1980s. Titled after one of Connelly’s artworks, Straighten Your Wig and Pray will offer a comprehensive overview and contextualization of the artist’s work from the late 1970s to 1993, the year of Connelly’s death from AIDS-related complications. The exhibition represents the culmination of unprecedented research in both depth and scope and will include several works by Connelly that have not been seen publicly in more than thirty-five years.

After studying at Southern Illinois University, Connelly moved to San Francisco, where he became involved in influential gender-fluid, avant-garde theater groups, designing sets for the Cockettes and Angels of Light. Relocating to New York in 1980, he became known for his lavish, uncanny, and meticulously embellished objects. A beloved fixture of the East Village in his lifetime, Connelly exhibited at the pioneering Fun Gallery and was part of a close-knit community of artists including Elaine Reichek, Jimmy Wright, Roberto Juarez, Jedd Garet, Agosto Machado, Nicolas Moufarrege, and Martin Wong, among others—a generation profoundly affected by the onset of AIDS. Much of Connelly’s work reflects the fragility and darkness of that era, yet joy, beauty, and humor remain enduring forces within his approach to subject and material alike.

Connelly’s practice across collage, sculpture and painting reimagines the visual vocabularies of Minimalism and Pop through a camp, craft-based, and surrealist sensibility, while drawing upon historical traditions of Mannerism and the Baroque. Closely aligned with the philosophy of the Pattern and Decoration movement, his work challenges traditional distinctions between fine art and ornament. Bridging the streetwise attitudes of New York’s East Village and San Francisco’s psychedelic utopianism, Connelly’s representations of American landscapes recur as motifs imbued with mystique and glamour, expressed through transcendent form and heightened color.

Arch Connelly: Straighten Your Wig and Pray is curated by Stella Bottai, Senior Curator-at-Large, and Daniel Merritt, Chief Curator, with Gemma Goette, Curatorial Assistant, and Simone Krug, Curator.