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The New York Times ran a deep diving look into the more artistic side of professional wrestling, noting how it has adapted into museum exhibitions and art galleries with drag-queen wrestlers battling giant bugs in Brooklyn to AEW stars performing in sleek Manhattan art spaces. All of this has created a scenario where curators and artists are discovering that the big characters, wild story lines and surreal drama make wrestling a kind of performance art all its own, allowing it to be embraced and presented in some unique environments.
The article even dovetails over into some professional wrestlers, including Thekla and Lee Moriarty, becoming artists themselves ahead of a planned museum exhibition in Florida in 2027.
The piece also notes:
"Moriarty’s entree into the art world was shepherded by Adam Abdalla, who curated his Night Gallery showing. Abdalla, who runs a New York PR firm focused on arts and culture (Night Gallery and Pérez Art Museum have both been clients), is a wrestling die-hard — he was trading videotapes of bouts as a 12-year-old in Brooklyn — and has become the de facto art/wrestling kingpin and clearinghouse. In 2020, he founded the journal Orange Crush, whose three issues brought a glossy magazine aesthetic and cerebral essays to the normally downscale world of wrestling publications.
The journal, which he said is currently on pause, ignited enough interest for him to champion artists like Moriarty and Thekla the Toxic Spider (Thekla Kaischauri), an Austrian-by-way-of-Japan A.E.W. star with an M.F.A., whose canvases apply Viennese Expressionism to the cage match.
“There’s always this tension between the high and low that brings new audiences to the arts,” Abdalla said. He now owns a wrestling league in New Jersey and is one of the curators of the exhibit coming to the St. Petersburg museum, where Kaischauri’s work was recently added to the permanent collection."
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