Steven Arnold: Sex & Spirit
Del Vaz Projects
Winter/Spring 2026
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Steven Arnold: Sex & Spirit at Del Vaz Projects will explore the social network, wunderkammer interiors, and baroque aesthetics of visionary Oakland-born and Los Angeles-based artist Steven Arnold—who died from AIDS in 1994. Restaging Zanzabar—a dilapidated house he converted into a palatial studio with dime-store- masqueraded luxuries where he composed tableaux vivants of celebrity and counter-culture luminaries alike—in our home gallery, the show will include archival photographs, costumes, posters, sculptures, furniture, ephemera, and ornaments created and collected by Arnold, an imaginative world where cinema was religion, spirituality was surreal, and queerness was divine.
Over the duration of the project, the staged exhibition space will function as a flamboyant, sociocultural container and instigator for contemporary artists, thinkers, and organizers to relationally respond to some of the pressing issues Arnold’s work raised and their relationship to our unprecedented times. Collaborating with photography, moving image, and queer-focused institutions and archives across the US, DVP will invite community-based and internationally-renowned queer creatives to participate in a series of world-building programming through which we will share and expand upon Arnold’s lesser-known legacy—exploring his influence on a contemporary audience.
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Image: Steven Arnold Connecting to the Infinite (1), 1985. © Courtesy The Steven Arnold Museum & Archives.