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MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS IN ST. PETERSBURG TO PRESENT EXHIBITION ON PRO WRESTLING & ART WITH PIECES BY THEKLA, LEE MORIARTY, DANNY HAVOC AND MORE

The following press release was issued to PWInsider.com:

The Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg presents first major U.S. museum exhibition on art and pro wrestling 

Opening 2027, the exhibition examines the crossover of contemporary art and professional wrestling, bringing together over 50 works exploring identity, performance, and the culture of the ring 

ST. PETERSBURG, FL – September 26, 2025 – The Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg (MFA) is proud to announce House Show: Power, Spectacle, and Pro Wrestling, opening in Fall 2027. This will be the first expansive American museum exhibition to explore the relationship between contemporary art and professional wrestling. Occupying over 5,000 square feet of gallery space and featuring more than 50 works, House Show (a reference to a non-televised pro-wrestling event) brings together artists and performers whose work engages the theatricality, intensity, and cultural complexity of the wrestling world. 

Co-curated by Katherine Pill, the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg’s Senior Curator of Contemporary Art and Adam Abdalla, founder of Orange Crush: The Journal of Art & Wrestling, the exhibition spans painting, sculpture, video, photography, and performance from the 1960s to the present. Drawing on wrestling's unique blend of fiction and reality, House Show uses the ring as a lens through which to examine broader cultural themes—including the construction of identity, performance of gender and sexuality, and the aesthetics of ritualized violence and care. 

At the heart of the exhibition is the concept of kayfabe, the long-standing wrestling term for the unspoken agreement between performers and audience to treat the scripted as sincere. This framework offers a timely reflection on how we navigate authenticity in contemporary life—across social media, politics, and everyday performance. Within this context, House Show highlights how wrestling dramatizes not just conflict, but empathy, collaboration, and trust. As scholar and former wrestler Broderick Chow writes, “While seemingly violent and antagonistic, pro-wrestling is actually a practice of caring for the other.” 

House Show brings together work made by performers themselves, including Thekla Kaischauri, Lee Moriarty, and Danny Havoc. 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. 

House Show will be accompanied by a robust slate of public programs, live events, and talks that draw from both the art and wrestling communities, further deepening the exhibition’s exploration of performance, power, and spectatorship. 

About the Museum of Fine Arts St. Petersburg 

The Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg (MFA) has an encyclopedic collection of art from around the globe and across the centuries, with almost 5,000 years of civilization represented in thousands of objects extending from antiquity to the present. The collection includes works by Georgia O’Keeffe, Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot, Auguste Rodin, Kehinde Wiley, Jacob Lawrence, and many others, as well as ancient Greek and Roman, Asian, African, Art of the Americas, and Native American art. The museum’s photographic collection is one of the largest and most well-respected in the Southeast. The museum’s rotating exhibition galleries feature a diverse selection of temporary exhibitions from all over the world, as well as exhibitions curated from the museum’s extensive collection. In addition to its robust exhibition program, the MFA engages the community through exciting public programs and events and serves students through youth programs and a partnership with the Pinellas County School System. 

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