Arch Connelly
Straighten Your Wig and Pray

Straighten Your Wig and Pray is the first museum survey dedicated to the work of Chicago-born artist Arch Connelly, a vibrant presence within New York’s East Village art scene of the 1980s. Spanning the late 1970s through 1993, the year of the artist’s death from AIDS-related complications, the exhibition offers the most comprehensive presentation of Connelly’s work to date.

Working across painting, sculpture, and collage, Connelly reimagined the visual vocabularies of Minimalism and Pop through a lavish and highly personal language of ornament, color, and craft. Drawing from the aesthetics of camp, Pattern and Decoration, and surrealism, his meticulously embellished objects bridge the exuberant spirit of the East Village with deeper reflections on beauty, fragility, and loss. Many works on view have not been publicly exhibited in more than three decades.

Arch Connelly: Straighten Your Wig and Pray is curated by Stella Bottai, Senior Curator-at-Large, and Daniel Merritt, Chief Curator. Archival research organized by Gemma Goette, Curatorial Assistant and Simone Krug, Curator. Exhibition design developed in collaboration with director and set designer Fabio Cherstich.

Special thanks to Kevin Haynie, Adam Voss, Sarah Lili Frey and Andrea Colombo. This exhibition is made possible by the collaborative and extensive support of a wide community of individuals who knew Arch Connelly and have contributed to the preservation and legacy of his work to the present day. Arch Connelly: Straighten Your Wig and Pray is made possible by generous support from Maison Valentino. Major support is provided by Aspen Art Museum Exhibition Circle, with special thanks to Daniel English, Nancy Magoon, H. Gael Neeson, Cecilia and Ernesto Poma, Katie and Amnon Rodan, Allison Rose, Gayle Stoffel, and Mary Zlot. Additional support is provided by J.P. Morgan Private Bank. General exhibition support is provided by the Toby Devan Lewis Visiting Artist Fund. Additional support is provided by Aspen Art Museum National Council. Support for artists is made possible by the Beckmann Kotzubei Artist Residency Fund. Aspen Art Museum exhibitions are made possible by the Marx Exhibition Fund.

Arch Connelly: Straighten Your Wig and Pray will be on view at the Aspen Art Museum from June 12 to October 11, 2026.

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Image: Arch Connelly to Jimmy Wright portrait photocopy as Troy Donahue correspondence, January 1975, 1975. Felt-tip pen and ink on paper. Sheet: 14 × 8 1/2in. (35.6 × 21.6 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Frances Mulhall Achilles Library and collection of Arch Connelly archival material, gift of Jimmy Wright SC.2018.16 Courtesy the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York