When Viennese artist and pop singer André Heller embarked on his quixotic plan to create an amusement park with the biggest artists of the 1980s, he envisioned bringing it to New York. This was not only because some of the park’s splashiest contributors – such as Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Roy Lichtenstein – lived in New York, but also because the city was a hub for experimental creativity and tolerance, which were fundamental in Heller’s message with his park, Luna Luna. Thirty-seven years after the park’s inaugural opening, in Hamburg, Germany, the carnival has finally landed at The Shed in New York for a run of more than a month (until 5 January 2025).
The original theme park featured around 30 rides designed by the world’s most influential artists at the time, such as Joseph Beuys, Sonia Delaunay, Rebecca Horn, Salvador Dalí, and David Hockney – in addition to downtown New York icons Haring, Basquiat and Kenny Scharf. Its 1987 stint in Hamburg, where the funding came from, drew an attendance of around 300,000 people in three months. Later, however, there followed decades-long obscurity as Heller’s plan to take his artistic fantasy on tour never came to fruition.
