The 1980s Art Carnival Luna Luna Will Come to New York

An original Basquiat Ferris wheel and a Keith Haring carousel are two of the high-art-meets-fairground attractions coming to New York this fall when Luna Luna, the once lost art carnival, travels to the Shed in Hudson Yards.

After languishing in a rural Texas warehouse, Luna Luna was rescued and restored thanks to intervention from the rapper Drake. Its first exhibition — no, you can’t ride the rides — opened in Los Angeles in December.

Originally conceived by the avant-garde Austrian artist André Heller, Luna Luna was inspired by local carnivals (called “luna parks” outside of the United States) and opened in Hamburg, Germany, in the summer of 1987.

Participating artists included Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Salvador Dalí, David Hockney, Sonia Delaunay, Roy Lichtenstein and Kenny Scharf, who either decorated vintage carnival equipment or created their own works for the pavilions.

In 1990, after a potential European tour and plans for the city of Vienna to buy Luna Luna fell through, Heller agreed to sell the project to the Stephen and Mary Birch Foundation. That decision set off decades of litigation over rights concerns and disputes on charging admission, and left Luna Luna untouched until its 2022 rescue.

Anthony Gonzales, the chief executive of Luna Luna and a partner in Drake’s DreamCrew, the rapper’s all-purpose business entity for creative projects, said the mix of avant-garde art and pop culture that is manifested in Luna Luna made it approachable to newcomers, as a sort of “Trojan horse” for gallery novices.