Stephen Prina: A Lick and a Promise

For the past five decades, artist, musician, and composer Stephen Prina has developed a singular and irreverent approach to installations, films, and musical performances. Prina frequently brings together networks of cultural materials—a Joni Mitchell song, Robert Bresson films, Glenn Gould recordings, the paintings of Édouard Manet—recombining them in different contexts to surface new meanings and associations.

Stephen Prina: A Lick and a Promise will be the first in-depth survey to focus on the artist’s long engagement with music and performance, bringing new perspectives to a central factor in Prina’s wider oeuvre: how cultural artifacts find new lives in different contexts. Unfolding across multiple locations in the Museum, including the Kravis Studio, the exhibition presents the world premiere of A Lick and a Promise (2025), an orchestral commission for 16 instruments, alongside restagings of works such as Sonic Dan (1994–2001). 

The survey highlights Prina’s wide-ranging collaborations, including a performance of Beat of the Traps (1992), created with Mike Kelley and Anita Pace. The series culminates with A Push Comes to Love Fest, an all-day concert on December 13, 2025, featuring a range of artists including David Grubbs, Ken Okiishi and Emily Sundblad, Ursula Oppens, Marina Rosenfeld, TILT Brass, and White People Killed Them (Raven Chacon, John Dieterich, and Marshall Trammell). This exhibition offers an opportunity to celebrate Prina’s innovative approach to appropriation—one uniquely focused on sound and music—and the rare warmth and intellectualism that mark him as a prescient and still-evolving artist.

Four works by Stephen Prina will also be installed in the galleries, including The Top Thirteen Singles from Billboard’s Hot 100 Singles Chart for the Week Ending September 11, 1993 (1993); Exquisite Corpse: The Complete Paintings of Manet, 41 of 556, Nymphe Surprise (The Startled Nymph), 1861, Nasjonalgalleriet, Oslo (1988), currently on view in Gallery 203; and Untitled/“The history of modern painting, to label it with a phrase, has been the struggle against the catalogue”—Barnett Newman/(Monochrome Painting, 1988–1989) (1991), currently on view in Gallery 414.​

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website