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Art & Design

World famous artists designed this carnival in 1987. nearly 40 years later, it's back.

Mandalit del Barco

An aerial view of Luna Luna in Moorweide park in Hamburg, Germany in 1987. Sabina Sarnitz/Luna Luna, LLC hide caption

An aerial view of Luna Luna in Moorweide park in Hamburg, Germany in 1987.

If you visited Hamburg, Germany, in the summer of 1987, you might have been one of the lucky 250,000 people to attend Luna Luna. It was a carnival designed by some of the most famous artists of the 20th century.

Visitors got to ride a small Ferris wheel adorned with drawings by Jean-Michel Basquiat. They could waltz inside a cylindrical pavilion created by David Hockney. They could wind through Roy Lichtenstein's pop art glass labyrinth, with music by Philip Glass; Fairgoers could also walk inside a mirrored geodesic dome decorated by surrealist Salvador Dalí, and they could ride a carousel painted with bright graffiti figures spray painted by Keith Haring.

Now, thanks to the rapper Drake, his studios and some investment partners, Luna Luna has been revived in Los Angeles.

Who thought this would work?

"I thought the idea sounded great because it is, in a way, something that has been a fantasy of mine since the first time I went to Disneyland or went to amusement parks in America when I was a kid," the late Keith Haring said in 1987 in a documentary about the park.

Luna Luna was the brainchild of Austrian multimedia artist André Heller — an avant-garde poet, singer and impresario. He was known in Europe for his hot air balloon sculptures, acrobatic circuses and firework spectacles that could be seen over the Berlin Wall.

"Creating an amusement park out of art was an early desire," Heller says in the documentary. "And we had to find the right artists in the right combination."

Kenny Scharf works on his painted swing ride for the original Luna Luna. Sabina Sarnitz/Luna Luna, LLC hide caption

Kenny Scharf works on his painted swing ride for the original Luna Luna.

Heller managed to convince 33 of the world's top contemporary artists to be a part of Luna Luna. Among them, American Kenny Scharf.

"He came just out of the blue and like, it sounded very far-fetched, but I'm like OK, great. And I loved doing it," recalls Scharf. "I really believed it was going to be this giant thing that was going to send me to the moon — you know, the art world moon."

Scharf remembers spending three weeks in a cold warehouse in Vienna customizing sculptures and a giant swing ride with his cartoon figures.

"Of course, I was into it," he says. "It fit perfectly with my philosophy for art then and now, which is art is not only for a wall with a frame in a gallery, a museum or above a couch; Art can be everywhere and should be. And art can be something that you experience and that you actually sit on and you swing around and it's fun."

Visitors ride on Kenny Scharf's painted swing ride in 1987. Sabina Sarnitz/Luna Luna, LLC hide caption

German artist Monika GilSing remembers designing flags for Luna Luna. "It was like a small miracle that an art world was created that people had never seen before, and it was very exciting to see art in this context," she says through an interpreter. "On the other hand, art critics — it seemed like they still needed some time to recognize what was going on, because it was such a new way of presenting art."

Monika GilSing works on Wind Images for Luna Luna in 1987. Sa/Luna Luna, LLC hide caption

The park closes

Luna Luna closed down after just three months, dashing Heller's grand plans to tour the park around the world. "It was an absolute masterpiece," he recalls in the documentary. "I had it in my hands, and I let it slip away."

Details of exactly what happened are as muddy as the fairgrounds had been that rainy German summer.

Michael Goldberg, a creative director in New York, says some fundraising deals fell through, and then Heller went back and forth with an American foundation that wanted to bring Luna Luna to San Diego.

"The foundation basically tried to back out of the deal and it ended up going through litigation in three different courts," he says.

In the end, everything that was in Luna Luna — dismantled rides, artwork and merch — was packed into 44 shipping containers. They languished on a desert ranch in Texas for decades.

For nearly 40 years, the Luna Luna attractions were packed away in shipping containers. Mandalit del Barco/NPR hide caption

Then, in 2020, Goldberg says he learned about the carnival and asked for Heller's blessing to launch Luna Luna 2.0.

With Dream Crew, the entertainment company run by megastar Drake and Live Nation as investors he spent $100 million to acquire the shipping containers sight unseen. Goldberg says it was a big risk.

"I was concerned, did I lead somebody into a deal and they were gonna buy a bunch of dust?" he says.

Goldberg remembers shaking nervously when they opened the first container, packed to the brim with posters and T-shirts from 1987.

"Some sort of critters or rodents had gotten in there and basically ripped the product to shreds," he recalls. "And then other pieces of the apparel are in perfect condition."

He says they were relieved opening the rest of the containers. "One of the first pieces that came out was one of the figures from the Keith Haring carousel. The work looked like it was painted yesterday."

Keith Haring's carousel at Luna Luna in Los Angeles. Jeff McLane/Luna Luna, LLC hide caption

With no instruction manuals, the team spent two years meticulously putting the attractions back together.

The park is reborn

Nearly 40 years after its premiere, Luna Luna has been recreated inside a warehouse in the Boyle Heights neighborhood near downtown Los Angeles.

Jean-Michel Basquiat's Ferris wheel at Luna Luna in Los Angeles. Sinna Nasseri/Luna Luna, LLC hide caption

Jean-Michel Basquiat's Ferris wheel at Luna Luna in Los Angeles.

Some of the original performances play on videos at the new exhibition, including an absurd "fart concert" that has visitors dumbfounded. Real-life stilt walkers and puppeteers from the Bob Baker Marionette Theater roam around the reconstructed, indoor park grounds.

Visitors are not allowed to touch the rides, but just like in 1987, visitors can still take their (unofficial) vows at the wedding chapel Andre Heller created for Luna Luna.

"This was André Heller's idea that you could get married to whomever or whatever you wanted," says curatorial director Lumi Tan. "In 1987, [that] was very radical, in a time when gay marriage wasn't legal."

She says today, like then, gay couples can get pretend-married (and pretend divorced) at Luna Luna. So can large groups of friends. "People were marrying family members and pets and inanimate objects," says Tan. "A photographer married his camera, for example."

Kenny Scharf says Luna Luna was ahead of its time, and when it folded in 1987, André Heller was completely crushed. So was he.

"It wasn't like I forgot about it," Scharf says. "I never forgot about it, in fact, I never stopped talking about it."

Kenny Scharf's painted swings at Luna Luna in Los Angeles. Joshua White/Luna Luna, LLC hide caption

Scharf, who lives in Los Angeles, says he hopes one day visitors will be able to fly around on his swing ride again. And from Hamburg where she still lives, GilSing, says she would love to see her flags flapping in the wind outside again.

The new owners do have plans to take Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy on the road, so you never know. The park's run in Los Angeles will close on May 12.

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Drake bought a fantastical, forgotten amusement park made by famous artists. It’s opening in L.A. this winter

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For decades, one of the world’s most unusual and unlikely amusement parks sat forgotten in shipping containers about two hours north of Dallas. Its visitors? Raccoons, some snakes. All the while, the glorious and outlandish rides of the little-known Luna Luna lay preserved and untouched.

Only these were no ordinary attractions.

The creations of Luna Luna were dreamed up by icons of contemporary art — an enchanted forest, for instance, crafted by David Hockney, or a Ferris wheel envisioned by Jean-Michel Basquiat, where the whimsical contrasts with violent images of an exploding house and stark phrases of racial inequality, all placed like graffiti in haste. There’s more, including a celebratory carousel from Keith Haring, where the artist’s curved creatures come alive as toy-like blocks.

These and other hand-crafted amusement park attractions will rise again, this time in Los Angeles. Luna Luna will emerge from purgatory for public viewing this month as part of a multimonth, immersive art exhibition. An exact opening date is still to be determined.

The exhibit, “Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy,” is backed by hip-hop artist Drake and his entertainment firm, DreamCrew, and will run through spring 2024, overtaking a sprawling Los Angeles warehouse space on the outskirts of downtown. Los Angeles is a fitting home for Luna Luna, for Southern California birthed the modern amusement park industry in 1955 with the opening of Disneyland, and arguably no other city is more consumed with the merger of art, commerce and entertainment.

Luna Luna — the term “luna park” was synonymous with amusement parks in the early 19th century — had the grand ideals of early Disneyland , in that it could merge the worlds of high and low art into something grandiose. But whereas Disneyland, with some notable exceptions, took its influences from early cinematic and animated works, Luna Luna let all its creators run free.

See, for example, Daniel Spoerri‘s restroom façade, created to mimic an imposing, concrete building, complete with mini towers of steaming excrement. Or a mirrored dome crafted by Salvador Dalí designed to disorient. The large-scale sculptures were welcoming in their humor, inviting in their exaggeration.

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Some of the attractions, such as Hockney’s forest and Dalí‘s dome, are intended to be timed experiences. Others, such as Basquiat’s Ferris wheel, are expected to be operational but not fit for guests. Curators say they likely weren’t up to modern code in 1987, when Luna Luna had a brief summer run in Hamburg, Germany, and most assuredly wouldn’t pass a 2023 inspection. But there is a common thread among the Luna Luna creations. They’re all full of life, color and movement, and they stand as celebrations of the amusement park as communal gathering spaces.

In archival footage of the original Luna Luna shows, for instance, Haring discusses his squiggly and arched shapes as if they are creatures from a fairy tale as he reminisces about a trip to Disneyland. “Luna Luna was special to Keith,” says Gil Vazquez, his friend, and president and executive director of the Keith Haring Foundation. .

“Reflecting on his own memories of times at amusement parks I’m sure brought back the magic of childhood that resonated deeply with him,” Vazquez says. “By creating a carousel with his famed figures, he in a sense gets to be Disney. Who doesn’t have great memories associated with state fairs, carnivals and the granddaddy of those, Disneyland?”

While Basquiat’s sisters Lisane Basquiat and Jeanine Heriveaux say the family regularly visited New York’s Coney Island as children, they note Luna Luna was still an unexpected art project for their late brother. “Jean-Michel loved play and fun,” says Lisane. “He enjoyed amusement parks and experienced them frequently as a child growing up in New York and, specifically, Brooklyn. Amusement parks were completely on brand for him, albeit an unusual place for him and his friends to collaborate.”

Though visitors won’t be able to hop on Haring’s carousel or Basquiat’s Ferris wheel, Luna Luna will attempt to create some of that carnival feel. Performers will wander the 60,000-square-foot complex, as Luna Luna will be part entertainment event and part historical show that documents how one André Heller created and conceived such a space. Heller’s own work bent toward the surreal, as he often worked with unexpected materials such as inflatables, including a balloon-like house for Luna Luna with multicolored porcupine spikes.

Taken as a whole, Luna Luna will have another mission: to reclaim the amusement park as an art-driven space. Luna Luna will make the argument that amusement and theme parks matter. There’s a reason, after all, Disneyland draws an estimated 17 million people per year, and it’s not solely because we love singing pirates. Amusement parks are a reflection of our culture’s myths and dreams, providing a place not to escape but to play. Luna Luna, like Disneyland, is a stage, a theatrical environment where we are the performers, a place of jubilation in good times and a communal balm in dark ones .

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“The luna park is always a dream space,” says Helen Molesworth, Luna Luna’s curatorial adviser and a former chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art. “It’s like someone goes around and untightens the screws of your need to behave, your need to be good, your need to be smart, your need to be proper. Someone just untightens those four screws, and you can think different things and feel different things.

“You can tap into whatever it is in you that you locked up, whether it’s your childhood or sense of adventure or desire to be scared or desire to be bamboozled,” Molesworth continues. “Whatever it is you talked yourself out of, this project lets you reengage with.”

“An epicurean view of life”

Luna Luna was ahead of its time. And in some ways it’s a miracle that it existed at all. The contemporary art world is filled with cynical looks at the themed-entertainment industry: Artists have been distorting Mickey Mouse imagery for nearly as long as the animated character has existed, and then, of course, there’s Banksy’s mid-2015 corporate teardown, Dismaland . Luna Luna is not that.

“An amusement park is, after all, mistakenly regarded as something less serious than, say, an exhibition at the Centre Pompidou [in Paris],” said Heller in the 1987 published Luna Luna exhibition book, which has been reissued today by Phaidon.

In 2023, the idea of an art park doesn’t seem so far-fetched. Disneyland, for one, is under constant reassessment, and what is an attraction such as It’s a Small World, designed almost entirely in the visions of artists Mary Blair and Rolly Crump , but a boat ride through a makeshift art gallery? Then there’s Meow Wolf, the Santa Fe, N.M.-based art collective that has opened theme park-inspired walk-through exhibitions in numerous cities, including Las Vegas and, most recently , Grapevine, Texas.

Heller was prescient in his merger of amusement parks and art institutions. “I find this project so interesting because, throughout the history of the 20th century in art, there’s been a dream on the part of artists to break down the boundaries between art and life,” Molesworth says. “This is one of those projects that does it.”

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Heller, whose initial Luna Luna began with a reported $500,000 grant from a German magazine, himself often spoke of trips to Vienna’s Prater amusement park as inspiration, contrasting lasting images of WWII outside its gates with the fantasy that was inside the park — the ventriloquists, trick shooters and tap dancers. “I have basically never stopped spinning the web of these childhood myths, a life-saving assertion of the imagination against the sum of what threatens me and causes me despair,” Heller said in the exhibition monograph.

Luna Luna’s resuscitation became a reality in 2022, when Drake’s entertainment firm DreamCrew acquired the Luna Luna assets for an undisclosed sum from the philanthropic Stephen and Mary Birch Foundation. The project was brought to DreamCrew via creative director Michael Goldberg, who in 2019 says he stumbled across an article about the original park, and then spent the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic becoming increasingly obsessed.

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“When Luna Luna first caught our attention, we knew we needed to be a driving force behind its resurrection,” read a statement from DreamCrew’s partner Anthony Gonzales. “Not only was this a once in a lifetime opportunity to rediscover a lost history and share the story with the world, but also gave us the ability to work with the most talented partners recreating the original vision, which still held so much untapped potential.”

But there were hurdles beyond just finding a buyer wealthy enough and interested in the project. Luna Luna was sitting in shipping containers in the small town of Nocona, Texas, and partners art attorney Daniel McClean and creative entrepreneur Justin Wills note that the Birch Foundation wanted a commitment to buy the entirety of the collection with relatively limited inspections.

“You’re driving along the road,” Wills says of his first trip to Nocona, “and from the side of the road you could see the shipping containers hiding in plain site. The ones with infrastructure in them were under an awning,” and some of the art pieces were residing in a metal barn.

McClean remembers seeing about three containers in 2018, a fraction of the entire exhibition. “It was enough to make me totally addicted,” he says.

“I recently had the opportunity to see the Ferris wheel in person and was taken aback by how fresh and new it felt, like so many of Jean-Michel’s works,” says Lisane Basquiat. “The moment was bittersweet, as I felt the joy that Jean-Michel and his friends must have experienced while working on the project.”

In relocating Luna Luna to Southern California, the park is ending up, in part, where it was always destined. After its summer 1987 run in Hamburg, where more than 240,000 people reportedly visited the attraction, Luna Luna was bound in the early ’90s for San Diego. Financial, legal and bureaucratic realities intervened, and Luna Luna has been barely heard from since.

That Luna Luna is something of a mystery, Molesworth says, is part of its appeal. “Here was this thing that existed, and disappeared, not only in reality but in lore,” Molesworth says. “It wasn’t like people were talking about it or telling stories about it. It fell off everyone’s collective radar. Then it reemerges, and it’s great.”

Luna Luna was in the early stages of its installation at two connected warehouses when The Times visited the space in late September. Many pieces sat in various states of disassembly and refurbishment. A glass labyrinth from Roy Lichtenstein, for instance, was largely a skeleton.

Figureheads for a Kenny Scharf swing set loomed over the reconstruction space, their elongated noses and alien-like ears setting a mischievous tone. Scharf’s swing set is striking, composed of panels of contrasting colors and objects; wondrous birds in the clouds intermix with mouths and eyes that appear as if they’re melting. McClean estimates the existing attractions were already at least 50 years old when Heller commissioned the artists to decorate them in the mid-1980s.

“I dreamt up Luna Luna with the determination that art should come in unconventional guises and be brought to those who might not ordinarily seek it out in more predictable settings,” said Heller via a statement. Heller is no longer involved in the project, stepping back after generating controversy for an alleged case of art forgery involving Basquiat’s Luna Luna work that he described as a “childish prank.”

The team has big ambitions for bringing Luna Luna to a new generation. Los Angeles is not just the first stop of a Luna Luna tour but the beginning of a larger cultural project, one that if all goes according to plan will see a new crop of today’s artists reimagining amusement park attractions. Wills couches that goal as “the grand vision,” but Molesworth is on board and the group has already been in touch with European ride manufacturers, as the hope is to someday tour something that is fully functional.

“Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy,” read the statement from DreamCrew’s Gonzales, “is the first installment of what will be a long-term project with a multi-faceted approach exploring the world of art and its intersection with today’s modern world.”

But one step at a time.

The goal, for now, is to teach people the history and then build the brand, to show the world not just Luna Luna but also what it means to be a Luna Luna artist. And perhaps to further tilt the cultural view surrounding amusement parks. Asked about the importance of such spaces, Wills gave a succinct thesis for Luna Luna. “This is an epicurean view of life, but the purpose is joy and fun. I think that’s why these spaces matter and why we need more of them.”

Amusement parks, adds Molesworth, “are one of the few places in our culture that cultivate intergenerational fun. You have the parent, the child, the teenager, the dating couple — there’s a place for all of those people to have a spot.”

Amusement parks, then, are not just a place to play; they’re spaces, perhaps, to better understand the world we live in.

Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy

Where: 1601 E. 6th Street

When: December through spring 2024. An exact opening date and schedule is still to be determined.

Price: Presale tickets start at $30. Discounts are available for military, veterans, students and children.

Info: lunaluna.com

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Todd Martens joined the Los Angeles Times in 2007 and covers a mix of interactive entertainment (video games) and pop music. Previously, Martens reported on the music business for Billboard Magazine. He has contributed to numerous books, including “The Big Lebowski: An Illustrated, Annotated History of the Greatest Cult Film of All Time.” He continues to torture himself by rooting for the Chicago Cubs and, while he likes dogs, he is more of a cat person.

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How Drake’s $100 Million Bet Saved the Long-Lost Art Carnival Luna Luna

In 1987, the Austrian artist André Heller debuted an avant-garde amusement park with works by Basquiat, Dalí and Haring. Its disappearance was a winding tale. Its return is even more bizarre.

A carousel designed by Keith Haring was part of the original Luna Luna. The park’s creator has spent decades dreaming of reviving it. Credit... Jake Michaels for The New York Times

Supported by

By Joe Coscarelli

• Nov. 17, 2022

LOS ANGELES — Earlier this year, in a 50,000-square-foot warehouse lined with weathered shipping containers and crates, the Viennese artist André Heller was reunited with one of the great loves of his life and career.

The psychedelic works inside, unseen by Heller or the world for 35 years, had long been lost to history, despite their flashy provenance. Together, they made up Luna Luna — a functional amusement park where the rides and attractions also happened to be contemporary art from the likes of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Salvador Dalí, which Heller had conceptualized and opened, briefly, in Hamburg, Germany, in 1987.

For decades, he had obsessed over its loss. “Forget about it,” he told himself repeatedly. “This is like a love affair where you can’t stop having erotic dreams.”

Eventually, Heller managed to move on. “And then,” he said via video chat from Austria, “when everything was out of my mind, I met some people that started reminding me.”

In the end, it took the connections, resources and ingenuity of Heller, his musician son, a New York creative director, an art lawyer, a start-up founder, two powerful music managers and a megawatt rapper who happens to be one of the most famous people on the planet to revive the ambitious project.

That Drake would be the final piece needed to bring Heller back together with Luna Luna was almost inconceivable. Heller, now 75, didn’t even know who the rap star was until they were nearly partners.

But sure enough — following years of lawsuits, rabbit holes, cosmic coincidences, false starts, contract negotiations, strokes of luck, Zoom calls and logistical nightmares — here was Heller, once again face to face with treasures that most in the art world didn’t even realize existed: a carousel by Keith Haring, an enchanted tree by David Hockney, a glass labyrinth by Roy Lichtenstein with music by Philip Glass.

“I excused myself to the art,” Heller recalled, emotional at the memory of at last glimpsing his disassembled carnival. “I said, ‘You were in prison for 35 years — please take my love and my apologies for what has happened to you.’

“Then I started touching all these things like a newborn baby with its father,” he added. “And I knew that the soul of the project was unharmed.”

How Luna Luna came to be — and then came to be sold, locked up, shipped to the Texas desert and forgotten — was a miracle-turned-tragedy for Heller, a rascally multimedia artist who has been, intermittently, an actor, a poet, a singer-songwriter and a circus impresario, with piles of stories from each of his many lives.

But the never-before-told next chapter of the tale, in which the art amusement park was tracked down, bought back and reimagined for a large-scale reboot scheduled to begin next year, sounds far-fetched even for Heller.

“When I first heard about Luna Luna I was blown away,” Drake said in a statement. “It’s such a unique and special way to experience art. This is a big idea and opportunity that centers around what we love most: bringing people together.”

Now, the hard part: putting Luna Luna back together, and taking it around the world.

“It’s an undeniable project,” said Anthony Gonzales, the new chief executive of Luna Luna and a partner in Drake’s DreamCrew , the rapper’s all-purpose business and management apparatus. “I think we’re actually built better than any other resource to make this a reality. We exist in live events, we exist in culture, we understand the art world and being artist-friendly.”

With reference points like Cirque du Soleil, the immersive van Gogh exhibits , the Miami “experiential art center” Superblue and that little vintage arts-and-crafts project known as Disneyland, DreamCrew and its partners have Drake-sized ambitions for Luna Luna.

To prepare the revamped park for a global tour with production help from Live Nation, a curatorial team with a collective C.V. that includes the Tate Modern, MOCA, the Kitchen and the Shed is engaging a fresh slate of artists to contribute new interactive and ridable pieces. Food and beverage options, music programming and educational workshops must also be top-notch, the team said.

The entire process is being captured for a documentary — Drake and DreamCrew have produced shows like “Euphoria” and “Top Boy” — while a reissue of the Luna Luna monograph, translated from the original German, is due in February .

“Drake’s done everything at the highest level,” Gonzales said, “and scale is something that he does better than anybody. This is a massive undertaking with huge logistical aspects, tons of moving parts. But it doesn’t seem overwhelming in my mind in any way whatsoever. It’s just like, ‘Let’s go and execute it.’”

The stakes are clear: Outside of music and touring, Gonzales said, “this is probably our biggest project to date.” With DreamCrew as majority owner, overall investment in Luna Luna is approaching $100 million.

‘Carnival of the Avant-Garde’

Known for his “large-scale, offbeat creations” and performances — surrealist vaudeville, Chinese acrobats, hot air balloons — Heller cashed in the cultural capital from his growing fame in the 1980s to pursue Luna Luna, a whimsical premise he had conceived of more than a decade earlier.

Inspired by the Prater amusement park of his youth, he hoped to use a fairground as his canvas “to build a big bridge between the so-called avant-garde — the artists who were a little snobbish sometimes and didn’t connect with the masses — and the so-called normal people,” Heller said.

“Every person you meet — all your friends — have a memory of a luna park,” he explained, using the international term for small local carnivals named for the original in Coney Island circa 1903. “Everybody had a childhood and I wanted to address the childhood of these geniuses.”

In 1985, Heller received a grant of about $350,000 from the German magazine Neue Revue for the project, and he traveled the world to convince his dream list of artists to participate.

Already, in Paris, he had secured the support of the Russian-French painter Sonia Delaunay , along with a design for an entry arch, before her death in 1979. In New York, an ailing Andy Warhol sent Heller to meet an up-and-coming Basquiat, who insisted on the inclusion of Miles Davis. Haring took Heller to meet Kenny Scharf. Lichtenstein gave a number for Hockney.

In Palm Beach, for blessings alone, Heller met with the Nobel-winning Jewish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer, whose letter of encouragement graced the back cover of the Luna Luna book. “From there on, I knew we couldn’t lose,” Heller said. (Only John Cage turned him down.)

Much of the work, like Basquiat’s Ferris wheel and Dalí’s mirrored fun house, were then fabricated in Europe, using vintage carnival equipment and some 220 artisans from the Viennese opera and theater community, working across multiple studios. Haring and Scharf traveled to Austria to work by hand.

Luna Luna opened in West Germany in June 1987. “There are 30 pavilions in this international carnival of the avant-garde, and each one simultaneously elevates the mind and makes the jaw drop,” Life magazine reported at the time.

Throughout that summer in Hamburg, an estimated 250,000 visitors enjoyed the attractions. From there, Heller hoped, Luna Luna would “travel the seas and the suns and the moons.”

But the artist’s streak of serendipity would soon be foiled by the realities of commerce and bureaucracy. Plans for the city of Vienna to buy the park and display it permanently were thwarted by political concerns. A European tour also fell through, sending Heller, who had received a loan to store the attractions, into debt.

In 1990, out of options, he agreed to sell the entire project for about $6 million to the Stephen and Mary Birch Foundation, a philanthropic group that hoped to show it in San Diego . But amid rights concerns, disputes over charging admission and other complications, the foundation attempted to pull out of finalizing the deal, setting off decades of litigation in courts from Delaware to Switzerland.

In time, the group would be forced to close its purchase. But Luna Luna languished in storage throughout the legal saga, and in 2007, was transported to rural Texas, where it would sit untouched for another 15 years.

Heller assumed that he would be long dead by the time anyone thought to open those doors again. “I won, I won, I won, I won, and I lost,” he said.

‘A Leap of Faith’

In 2019, the creative director Michael Goldberg was clicking around an obscure website that an intern had sent him when he happened upon one of the rare detailed mentions of Luna Luna online. Immediately, he was smitten.

“It just felt like something I should have known about,” Goldberg, whose Something Special Studios has worked with Nike and the Brooklyn Museum, said in an interview. But when he began texting his most plugged-in contacts — art advisers, collectors, “kids who know what’s up” — nobody knew what he was talking about. “OK, this is really starting to become interesting,” he thought.

Experienced in the world of New York nightlife and entertainment events but with no obvious inroads to the project, Goldberg let his imagination lead, prematurely plotting ways to resurrect the Luna Luna brand. As a Hail Mary, he sent a series of cold emails to Heller’s studio.

What Goldberg didn’t know at the time was that Heller had recently been pulled back down the same path. Encouraged by the art historian Dieter Buchhart, a Basquiat scholar, Heller and the lawyer Daniel McClean, who specialized in art restitution, were already exploring ways to liberate Luna Luna.

“Andre was like the poison and the cure,” McClean said. “This was sold by him, but he also had to be part of any purchaser that bought it back, because he has the know-how and the relationship with the artists.”

A billionaire collector looked into funding the deal, but the sellers insisted that the works be bought as-is, sight unseen, cooling interest. “We had a very apocalyptic view of what the contents of the containers would be,” McClean said. Upon being granted a limited inspection of one in 2018, he was greeted by water sloshing out.

It was Goldberg, clinging to hope that he could get involved somehow, who planted the seed with Drake’s DreamCrew. “Within a 30-second conversation of ‘this existed,’ we were all in,” Gonzales said of taking it to the rapper and his manager Adel Nur, who is known as Future the Prince. “‘How do we get involved?’”

Drake “got it the fastest,” Nur said. “He buys what he likes in terms of art and has homes around the world to place those pieces in. He’s always had an eye for great things, and he’s a big thinker. He sees something like this and his brain activates right away.”

Connecting the dots during the Covid-19 pandemic, Goldberg floated the potential savior to Heller’s son, Ferdinand, a musician, who encouraged his father to hear out the improbable overture. Heller, in turn, did his own Drake research — “listening to his music, watching his attitudes” — and began to think that fate had again intervened on his behalf.

In his typically lyrical telling, Heller compared DreamCrew swooping in to “when you promise your child a swimming pool and then somebody comes and is like, ‘Wouldn’t you like to have the Mediterranean Sea?’”

Still, negotiations dragged on for months, with the identity of the buyer remaining a secret from the Birch Foundation. “Once we mentioned that word” — Drake — “everything fell into place,” McClean said.

In January, Luna Luna left its Texas home — and the rattlesnakes, skunks and armadillos that had taken up residence around and under it — for Los Angeles, in 44 containers, two wagons and seven crates.

For its new owners, the condition of the art was still a mystery that the partners likened to an “Indiana Jones” archaeological dig, a dive into the “Titanic” and a game of Russian roulette.

“You take that mystical leap of faith,” McClean said. “But we lucked out — it’s a whole treasure trove.”

A New Beginning

A visit to the Luna Luna warehouse in the Boyle Heights area of Los Angeles this fall revealed an enormous industrial workshop shot through with shocks of cartoon color. Basquiat’s Ferris wheel, adorned with a drawing of a disembodied baboon behind, towered on one end, while experts in refurbishment tended to panels from Delaunay’s entrance arch by spotlight.

A Wonka-esque factory with some start-up vibes, there were kick scooters to get around and table tennis for the studio hands on their lunch break. Thousands of pieces of original merchandise were being sorted and revitalized, including old posters and T-shirts designed by the artists, each of which needed to be cleaned and dried by hand.

In an earlier interview, Kathy Noble, the curatorial director of the new Luna Luna, called it “a Trojan horse of experimental art.” She marveled at how Heller, by simply following his whims, had managed to construct a survey that covered large swathes of 20th century Western art history.

“The number of artistic movements it covers is kind of crazy,” she said. “Everything from abstraction, art brut, Dada, Fluxus, Neo-Expressionism, nouveau realism, pop art, surrealism, Viennese Actionism — most exhibitions will not cover this breadth.”

In addition to restoring the existing rides — many of which will be displayed but are now too valuable to be experienced directly by the public — Noble, along with the curatorial adviser Helen Molesworth and others, have been tasked with commissioning new experiential works in the same spirit.

Meanwhile, the Luna Luna partners — DreamCrew, McClean, Goldberg and Justin Wills, a tech entrepreneur and art collector, who is heading up operations — are consulting everyone from aficionados in antique carnival rides to trucking companies, in anticipation of a wide-scale launch.

The global march, Gonzales said, will require “marrying the white-glove service of art transport with the movement of a concert tour.” An in-house data analytics person is working to determine ticket pricing.

“Everybody knows what Drake is,” Gonzales said. “This is now: ‘How do we market something that’s never existed before?’”

For the rapper and his team, who have made a career out of elevating subcultures to a mainstream level, the goal is to carry on Heller’s initial aim of bringing the avant-garde to the masses in a digestible package.

But Heller, in a last-minute twist, will no longer be involved himself.

As Luna Luna plotted its grand return, the Austrian magazine Falter revealed Heller’s role in what he brushed off as a childish prank, but others have said borders on art forgery. Cutting up drawings Basquiat made for Luna Luna, Heller had created a frame in his old friend’s style that was later presented for sale as a Basquiat original, he confirmed to Falter.

Given the lapse in judgment and whatever fallout may come, Heller, it was decided, could not remain hands-on with the return of his luna park.

“I am passing the baton to the partners of Luna Luna, who have the energy, vision and respect to keep the spirit of Luna Luna alive,” he said in a statement. “It feels miraculous that the artworks from Luna Luna will again see the light of day, and I am honored that a new generation around the world will experience the wonder of Luna Luna for many years to come.”

Heller declined to comment further. But as bittersweet as it may seem that Luna Luna is once again moving on without him, it always was bigger than Heller — a reality he accepted over and over again throughout its turbulent life.

Earlier, he had praised Drake’s own “love story with Luna Luna,” certain that their paths had intertwined for a reason, and that each obstacle was a necessary struggle.

“It’s always out of every bad thing comes something extremely good,” Heller said. “The chance that this happened is so little that it must have an inner truth that I’m not aware of yet.”

An earlier version of a picture caption with this article misidentified two members of the Luna Luna creative team. Anthony Gonzales and Daniel McClean appear second and third from left, not the other way around.

How we handle corrections

Joe Coscarelli is a culture reporter with a focus on pop music. His work seeks to pull back the curtain on how hit songs and emerging artists are discovered, made and marketed. He previously worked at New York magazine and The Village Voice. More about Joe Coscarelli

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Here’s what it’s like inside Luna Luna, a forgotten art carnival that’s been reborn in L.A.

First staged in Germany in 1987, it features carnival rides decorated by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Salvador Dalí and Keith Haring.

I hadn’t even heard of the original Luna Luna until I received an invite to check out its revival a couple of weeks ago. At first glance, its cross-decades lineup of contemporary art icons seemed too good to be true—as if the Beatles, Led Zeppelin and Elvis had staged a festival that was lost to time. But the thin Google results proved this was legit, and after now visiting in person, I can tell you firsthand that Luna Luna is very much alive.

Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy has rescued an art carnival that was staged in Germany in 1987 and resurrected it on a soundstage in L.A., just next to the Sixth Street Viaduct in Boyle Heights. The restored swings, carousels and Ferris wheel (all of which you can look at but can’t touch) come from a staggering array of artists: Jean-Michel Basquiat, Salvador Dalí, Keith Haring, David Hockney, Roy Lichtenstein, Kenny Scharf and Sonia Delaunay, to name a few.

As of December 15, you can step inside Luna Luna for yourself at Ace Mission Studios. Timed tickets are available through the spring of 2024 and cost $38 on weekdays and $48 on weekends, with kids tickets for $20. There’s also an $85 VIP “Moon Pass” option that throws in parking, a pin and a chance to step inside both the Dalí and Hockney pieces—though more on that in a bit.

Though it was supposed to tour the world, Luna Luna never went on display outside of its original run in Hamburg until now. The short version of the intervening three decades: litigation, storage and hip-hop. A New York Times story from last year covers the story quite in depth, but essentially Luna Luna could find neither a permanent home (Vienna turned it down) nor a proper tour (plans to head to San Diego fell through), and the foundation that ultimately purchased it became tied up in lawsuits. As a result, the carnival was packed into 44 shipping containers, which were eventually moved to the Texas prairie. A few years ago, a handful of art world partners began an effort to purchase Luna Luna, which they were able to successfully do with the help of Drake (yes, that Drake) and his media company DreamCrew. Bought sight unseen, the unopened containers turned out to be in pretty good shape, and in January of 2022 they were brought into an L.A. studio in preparation for display.

The resulting show is a colorful jubilee of larger-than-life installations, originally created by the artists themselves (you can watch archival footage of Keith Haring standing in front of his carousel with a paintbrush in hand) or artisans at the Vienna opera. Of the nearly 30 original works, 16 are currently on display; the rest are in storage elsewhere in L.A. and undergoing restoration work.

To be clear, you can’t actually ride any of the carnival attractions (though you can walk inside of both Dalí’s and Hockney’s installations if you upgrade to a Moon Pass). Instead, the rides here are presented like they’re in a museum, though one with colorful lighting, whirling motors, jugglers, stilt walkers and musical compositions by Miles Davis and Philip Glass floating around. If you were only planning on visiting thinking that you’d get a seat on the swings, then you’ll need to adjust your expectations. But if, like me, you’re the kind of person who’s content strolling around Disneyland and soaking up the atmosphere without ever setting foot on a ride, you’ll love Luna Luna. (It’s also worth mentioning here that I explored the event during a nearly-empty press preview as well as a packed opening party and still found the atmosphere magical at both.)

“We really like how amusement parks encourage people to take their own pathways, so it’s kind of a very open experience,” curatorial director Lumi Tan says of Luna Luna’s layout. Each ride will flicker to life and spin multiple times an hour, but there’s no set route to move between them.

All that said, you can step inside of two stationary pieces: David Hockney’s Enchanted Tree , a towering, cylindrical pavilion where you can listen to waltzes, and Salvador Dali’s Dalídom , a geodesic dome lined with trippy triangular mirrors and shocking pink panels ( of course there’s a photographer stationed near the entrance). That you can only do so if you spend $85 on the Moon Pass is admittedly a bit disappointing, but I do think you could observe both from the outside only and still have a fantastic time while saving quite a bit of cash.

Austrian artist André Heller first began to assemble the artists for Luna Luna in the early 1970s, and his inflatable, walk-through Dream Station is the first thing you’ll see outside of the show. Once inside, a 1930s swing ride covered in panels painted by Kenny Scharf will immediately compete for your attention, especially if it’s lit up and spinning. In fact, just about every attraction on display at Luna Luna will play music, illuminate or animate over the course of your visit, whether that’s the unmistakably Keith Haring carousel, Arik Brauer’s face-in-hole merry-go-round or the facade for Manfred Deix’s Palace of the Winds , which blasts a soundtrack of violin and farts (you can watch flatulent footage from the original theater in Hamburg, where bare behinds lined up on stage in front of microphones).

And that’s only the first room: Walk underneath Sonia Delaunay’s “Luna Luna” archway and you’ll find yourself in another cavernous space, anchored on one end by a white, all-wood 1920s Ferris wheel adorned with Jean-Michel Basquiat’s familiar motifs: anatomical, historical, and musical drawings and words, with a baboon’s ass visible on the back. This is where you’ll also find a glass labyrinth wrapped in triangular Roy Lichtenstein panels and a wedding chapel from Heller that lets you marry whoever or whatever you’d like (you’ll receive a Polaroid and a faux marriage certificate that you can void simply by ripping it up).

There’s a playfulness to most of the pieces here, and even though their sometimes grotesque characters and peculiar compositions don’t fit what we think of today as “kid-friendly,” this definitely was—and still is—something intended for all ages.

“Amusement parks are already a place where you feel this very large range of emotions,” Tan says. “I think André wanted to play on that and not have artists hold back.”

And they didn’t. This was still only a handful of decades removed from World War II, and the artists—many of them Jewish and based in Europe—were still processing the era’s trauma in their work. There’s an anti-fascist bent to much of it, too. Just look at Daniel Spoerri’s Crap Chancellery , a replica of the Nazi headquarters with columns topped with steaming piles of poop and an interior that doubled as both an actual bathroom and a gallery of digestion-inspired assembly sculpture (in L.A., only the facade and non-steaming poop pillars are viewable).

“It was not all just fun and joy,” Tan explains. “There was a lot of serious intent around reclaiming a childhood that they did not get to have in the postwar period.”

With such oddly impactful substance behind the aesthetics and such an array of artistic movements represented, it’s nearly impossible in our social media-driven age to think of how something like this didn’t become a cultural touchstone in the way that something like the more recent Dismaland did. Search online for Luna Luna now and you’ll of course find plenty, but even just a few weeks ago the internet was oddly thin on info about the initial run in Hamburg. As I was wrapping up my time inside Luna Luna, I couldn’t help but think how this was ever able to fade away in the art world, a scene that often exalts its big names like mythological titans. After all, around 300,000 people visited the original Luna Luna, and it had write-ups in Life and The New York Times around its opening. So what happened? That’s been part of Tan’s research in putting this show together. Her best understanding: The fair’s private sponsorship, Heller’s relatively locally-limited fame and a contempt for amusement parks made Luna Luna elude art historians’ notice. “Maybe people didn’t really think it was real artwork or they didn’t know how involved the artists were,” she muses.

It seems unlikely the same thing will happen again after Luna Luna’s L.A. run (and not just because of all of the items available in the gift shop, either). There are plans—presumably for real this time—for it to tour, and even if it somehow doesn’t, this will surely be the exhibition to see in L.A. for months to come.

Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy is open at Ace Mission Studios through the spring of 2024. Timed tickets cost $38 on weekdays, $48 on weekends, $20 for kids and $85 for VIP.

• Michael Juliano Editor, Time Out Los Angeles

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The Experimental Art Carnival Luna Luna Comes Back to Life

Once a lost chapter in the contemporary art narrative, the fair is being resurrected in Los Angeles. The timing couldn’t be better.

Over the past two years, a secretive team of art restorers has been hard at work excavating a trove of long-lost treasures: a theme park built entirely by artists, many of them legends of their time, that enchanted a major European city for several months and then disappeared. A Ferris wheel by Jean-Michel Basquiat. A carousel enlivened by Keith Haring’s energetic lines. A cylindrical pavilion made of geometric trees by David Hockney.

This December, Luna Luna, as the park was called, makes a triumphant return. A show titled “Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy” will open to the public in a warehouse in East Los Angeles that spans more than 60,000 square feet—more exhibition space than the entire Whitney Museum. In an attempt to re-create the hazy, romantic mood of a carnival at dusk, the space will be largely undivided by interior walls. In addition, lighting will be kept to a minimum, which will allow the artworks—which is to say, the amusement park rides, many of which are illuminated—to shine. A 1980s soundtrack, featuring everything from Philip Glass to Euro pop hits, will thrum throughout. “What we’re hoping is that the experience is something like seeing the original,” says Helen Molesworth, the show’s curatorial adviser. “It’s going to have a magical feel.”

The original poster for Luna Luna, with drawings from each contributing artist.

Artist and park creator André Heller’s the Dream Station.

Luna Luna was the brainchild of André Heller, an Austrian multidisciplinary artist known for his fantastical installations and mischievous streak. “Carousels and swings have always been revolving sculptures,” he once wrote. “Scary train rides—they have always been a space for images, reliefs, and theatrical machines.” In the late 1970s, Heller began to conceive of an art theme park. Members of the establishment scoffed at the idea, but artists ranging from early-20th-century masters like Salvador Dalí to upstarts like Haring and Basquiat soon came on board. Kenny Scharf made a swing ride. Basquiat decked out a Ferris wheel in his signature style and added music by Miles Davis. Dalí made a “Dalí Dome,” a mirrored, photography-friendly precursor to Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Rooms. Heller’s own contributions were a Wedding House (where people could marry what or whomever they wanted) and the Dream Station (an inflatable sculpture that housed a café).

Heller’s choice to hold the fair in a park in Hamburg, Germany, was no lark. His father had been detained by the Nazis during World War II, and the ground where Heller’s joyful artistic experiments were installed was once used as a staging area to deport Jews to concentration camps. “Heller thought of Luna Luna as a postwar project,” says Molesworth. “It asks the question: What needs to happen to make sure that fascism never takes hold again? As much as Luna Luna is a funhouse, it’s a funhouse designed to try and keep you open, curious, empathetic, and childlike so you don’t become a hard, crass person capable of hatred and anti-Semitism.”

Jean-Michel Basquiat’s painted Ferris wheel.

Basquiat sketching his designs.

During the summer of 1987, thousands of people experienced what was praised by Life magazine as “an international art carnival of the avant-garde” that “simultaneously elevates the mind and makes the jaw drop.” But once the carousels stopped spinning at the end of the season, the rides and attractions were “buried alive,” as Heller once put it, for 35 years. There were plans to revive Luna Luna anywhere from Vienna to San Diego, but after a series of philanthropic false starts, funding disputes, and legal battles, the works ended up languishing in crates and shipping containers in rural Texas.

During that time, Luna Luna almost became a lost chapter in the contemporary art narrative. Although the fair had made a splash regionally, it didn’t really make an impact overseas. “One of the things we’ve all forgotten is what life was like before the Internet,” says Molesworth. Records of the park surfaced online in only a handful of places, among them a post on the culture blog “Minnie Muse.” In 2019, a link to the site made its way to the inbox of Michael Goldberg, the astute and well-connected founder of the creative agency Something Special Studios, whose antenna immediately went up. “Luna Luna had soul,” Goldberg says. “There was a purpose to it.”

Keith Haring at work on his carousel.

Haring’s finished carousel.

A poster by Haring.

Young visitors on Kenny Scharf’s chair swing ride.

Kenny Scharf’s chair swing ride.

Soon after, Goldberg brought up the project’s sad fate in a meeting with Anthony Gonzales, a partner in DreamCrew, the rapper Drake’s business arm. Within a day, Gonzales texted him: “Do you think there’s an opportunity for us to buy it?” Soon—with Heller’s blessing and financial backing from DreamCrew; Goldberg, who is now Luna Luna’s CXO; and several other investors—the carnival made its way to L.A., where it has been painstakingly reassembled.

Sadly, even the most thorough restoration can’t quite get a 35-year-old theme park ride up to modern safety standards, meaning visitors won’t get a chance to take a spin on anything. But “Forgotten Fantasy” will put the project into context with artistic timelines and insight into the process of unearthing and restoring the rides. An early vision for resurrecting Luna Luna was to incorporate new experiences by leading contemporary creatives into the mix, but the idea was scrapped in favor of showcasing the original in all its glory. But Goldberg sees the display as just the beginning of an ongoing project that includes “a full-on contemporary art amusement park.” While details are sparse, one can only imagine the possibilities. It’s not a huge stretch to envision a Jeff Koons roller coaster, a Cindy Sherman funhouse, or a snack bar by Rirkrit Tiravanija.

“Heller showed us what the future would be, which is a blur between art and entertainment,” Molesworth says. And although it might be tempting to be cynical about an art carnival in the age of social media bait, the central ethos of Luna Luna remains as relevant as ever. “Art offers food for thought and qualities of all kinds, making people laugh or administering a positive shock,” Heller wrote. “The peculiar undertaking that is Luna Luna is an expression of this conviction.”

Salvador Dalí’s pavilion.

Inside the Dalí pavilion.

Sonia Delaunay’s entrance archway.

A Long-Awaited Revival for André Heller’s Art Carnival

Though it only opened for one summer in the ‘80s, the art-filled luna luna park comes back to life in los angeles as a reminder to stay curious and empathetic..

For the past two years, a team of restorers has been refurbishing a trove of amusement park rides created by some of the most legendary artists of our time. This is no chintzy rehash of Mickey Mouse ears or a Banksy-esque corporate teardown á la Dismaland , but a fully functioning art carnival that actually existed for one sticky late-‘80s summer in Hamburg. There was a swing ride by Kenny Scharf; a carousel enlivened by Keith Haring’s animated characters; a Ferris wheel given the Basquiat treatment; a “Dalí Dome” that perhaps laid the foundation for Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Rooms to dominate Instagram decades later. Named Luna Luna, the park was the brainchild of André Heller, the mischievous Austrian artist and impresario who viewed carousels and swings as tantamount to “revolving sculptures.”

The art establishment initially scoffed at Heller’s grand plans for Luna Luna, but a reported 240,000 eager spectators showed up to witness what Life magazine gushed about as “an international art carnival of the avant-garde” that “elevates the mind and makes the jaw drop.” Once the season wrapped and the carousels ground to a halt, however, the rides disappeared for 35 years. Financial, legal, and bureaucratic disputes hamstrung Heller’s plans to bring Luna Luna to San Diego and Vienna. The rides had been sitting abandoned in shipping containers near the remote Texas town of Nocona ever since, an overlooked snippet of the contemporary art canon awaiting a deep-pocketed buyer to bring the carnival back to life.

Given how Luna Luna’s lifespan preceded smartphones, scant documentation exists of it online. In 2019, though, a post from the culture blog “ Minnie Muse ” landed in the inbox of Michael Goldberg, founder of the creative agency Something Special Studios , whose attention was piqued. He mentioned it in a meeting with DreamCrew , rapper Drake’s entertainment firm, which agreed to invest in Luna Luna’s revival. “When Luna Luna first caught our attention, we knew we needed to be a driving force behind its resurrection,” Anthony Gonzales, a partner at DreamCrew, told the Los Angeles Times . “Not only was this a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to rediscover a lost history and share the story with the world, but [it] also gave us the ability to work with the most talented partners recreating the original vision, which still held so much untapped potential.”

They soon acquired the park’s assets from the Stephen and Mary Birch Foundation, transported the rides to California, and began painstakingly reassembling them in two sprawling warehouses near Downtown Los Angeles, where Luna Luna’s long-awaited second act will open this month and run through the spring. The aptly named revival “ Forgotten Fantasy ” brings Luna Luna’s attractions back to life, but don’t expect to ride anything. (Modern safety codes curbed that prospect, and many of the original rides are too fragile to operate.) Instead, it’s all about basking in the carnival’s dusky atmosphere and being wowed by its very existence. Minimal interior lighting and few dividing walls allow the luminous rides to gleam kaleidoscopically, augmented by an ‘80s-themed soundtrack spanning Philip Glass to Europop.

Heller, now 76, isn’t involved this time around, but the park’s roots impart an important history lesson. His father was detained by the Nazis in Hamburg during World War II; on Luna Luna’s original site, they deported Jews to concentration camps. “Heller thought of Luna Luna as a postwar project,” Helen Molesworth, the show’s curatorial adviser and the former chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, told W . “It asks the question: What needs to happen to make sure that fascism never takes hold again? As much as Luna Luna is a funhouse, it’s a funhouse designed to try and keep you open, curious, empathetic, and childlike so you don’t become a hard, crass person capable of hatred and antisemitism.” The park, its ebullient artistic experiments, and its new beginnings are a reminder to tap into that wonder so history doesn’t repeat itself.

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Drake Resurrects Avant-Garde Amusement Park Designed by Basquiat, Dalí and Hockney

The rap star has invested nearly $100 million to bring back the ambitious 1987 carnival

Ella Feldman

Daily Correspondent

What happens when you call up some of the greatest artists of the 20th century—including  Jean-Michel Basquiat ,  Salvador Dalí ,  Philip Glass ,  Keith Haring ,  David Hockney and  Roy Lichtenstein —and ask them to design an amusement park?

In 1987, Austrian artist André Heller did just that. The result was  Luna Luna , a carnival that Heller created to be a “bridge between the so-called avant-garde—the artists who were a little snobbish sometimes and didn’t connect with the masses—and the so-called normal people,” he tells the  New York Times ’ Joe Coscarelli.

Luna Luna was successful but short-lived. It opened in Hamburg, Germany, but soon financial woes and bureaucratic back-and-forths sent the park into storage, where it collected dust for decades. Heller had long-accepted that Luna Luna was over, he tells the Times .

Then, one financial investor turned everything around: Aubrey Drake Graham, better known as rap mega-superstar  Drake .

How did a whimsical art experiment that got lost to time end up receiving nearly $100 million from Drake? The story begins in 2019 with Michael Goldberg, a creative director and founder of  Something Special Studios . Per the Times , Goldberg stumbled across a  website detailing Luna Luna’s story and was immediately charmed. 

He brought the story of Luna Luna to  DreamCrew , Drake’s creative business venture. “Within a 30-second conversation of ‘this existed,’ we were all in,” Anthony Gonzales, a partner in DreamCrew, tells the Times . Gonzales now serves as  Luna Luna ’s chief executive.

As Goldberg and Drake’s DreamCrew were becoming enthralled with Luna Luna, Heller had already been thinking about reviving his project. After months of negotiations, Heller agreed to place Luna Luna in the hands of Drake and his team. Speaking with the Times , the Austrian artist compared DreamCrew’s sudden interest to “when you promise your child a swimming pool and then somebody comes and is like, ‘Wouldn’t you like to have the Mediterranean Sea?’”

The restoration of Luna Luna is in full swing in Los Angeles, and an American tour is slated for fall 2023. An international tour will follow in 2024, per Artnet ’s Vittoria Benzine. The new Luna Luna will feature original pieces—some of which will be on display as artwork instead of up-and-running rides—alongside newly commissioned pieces in the spirit of the original Luna Luna.

Ahead of its global tour, Luna Luna will reissue the original Luna Luna book , translated from German to English, which tells the story of the 1987 carnival. The book is scheduled for release on February 15, 2023.

Heller, however, is no longer affiliated with the reboot. He left the project after the Austrian magazine  Falter ’s Matthias Dusini revealed that he had presented an artwork he made himself for sale as a Basquiat original . While he said his actions were simply a “childish prank,” the Luna Luna team decided it was best for him to part ways with the project.

“I am passing the baton to the partners of Luna Luna, who have the energy, vision and respect to keep the spirit of Luna Luna alive,” says Heller in a statement, per the Times . “It feels miraculous that the artworks from Luna Luna will again see the light of day, and I am honored that a new generation around the world will experience the wonder of Luna Luna for many years to come.”

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Ella Feldman | READ MORE

Ella Malena Feldman is a writer and editor based in Washington, D.C. She examines art, culture and gender in her work, which has appeared in Washington City Paper , DCist and the Austin American-Statesman .

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Welcome to Luna Luna, the carnival that time forgot

• Deep Read ( 1 Min. )
• By Ali Martin Staff writer

March 13, 2024 | Los Angeles

Whimsy is everywhere at Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy. 

The fact that so many of this art carnival’s “rides” are only for gazing upon hardly lessens the joy.

Why We Wrote This

Amusement parks offer an escape from the doldrums of everyday life. But rather than thrills, this art carnival peddles whimsy and joy.

“You just smile,” says Gina Gallo, an animated-film producer visiting the exhibit. “It’s eye candy for the soul.”

The fanciful pieces, on display this spring in Los Angeles, have roots in Hamburg, Germany, where Austrian multimedia artist André Heller in the 1980s summoned a who’s who of visionaries to think up rides, music, and immersive experiences for an amusement park. Salvador Dalí added a domed, mirrored room; David Hockney created his version of a forest; Jean-Michel Basquiat dreamed up a Ferris wheel. 

After its Hamburg run, the park was packed up and put away in storage, where it languished for decades. Rapper Drake helped revive it with a $100 million investment from his entertainment company. Every detail of every structure invites discovery by the exhibit’s visitors even if no one can climb aboard.

“It’s magical,” Mimi Maynard says.

Expand this story to experience the full photo essay.

Whimsy is everywhere at the art carnival Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy. Don’t try to hop on the carousel, though. That’s designed by Keith Haring, one of the 20th century’s most celebrated artists.

The fact that so many works at Luna Luna, which runs through this spring in Los Angeles, are only for gazing upon hardly lessens the joy.

The fanciful pieces have roots in Hamburg, Germany, where Austrian multimedia artist André Heller in the 1980s summoned a who’s who of visionaries to think up rides, music, and immersive experiences for an amusement park. Salvador Dalí added a domed, mirrored room; David Hockney created his version of a forest; Jean-Michel Basquiat dreamed up a Ferris wheel. And music by Philip Glass filled a pavilion by Roy Lichtenstein.

After its Hamburg run, the park was packed up and put away in storage, where it languished for decades. It took rapper Drake to help revive it – with a $100 million investment from his entertainment company. Every detail of every structure invites discovery.

The attractions beckon Mimi Maynard, who runs a production company with Ms. Gallo and a third partner. She says she wishes she could climb aboard.

“It’s magical,” she says.

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reviving luna luna: world's first amusement park with works by haring & basquiat lands in LA

Luna luna: forgotten fantasy travels to los angeles.

Remember Luna Luna , the world’s first traveling art carnival? It’s currently on its way to Los Angeles, opening its doors in December 2023. Titled ‘Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy,’ this dreamy fair, which is described as the world’s first amusement park and lost since 1978, invites guests into the world of rediscovered one-of-a-kind public artworks . Among the highlights are a Ferris wheel crafted by Jean-Michel Basquiat, a carousel designed by Keith Haring , and immersive pavilions created by David Hockney, Roy Lichtenstein, and Salvador Dalí, each with fascinating stories to tell. The Los Angeles edition promises to enchant visitors with its collection of striking art pieces and rides, all housed within a sprawling 60,000 sqft warehouse complex.

the story of luna luna, the forgotten fantastical fair

Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy (find more here ) provides a modern audience with an immersive encounter with the recently rediscovered Luna Luna. Conceived by the Austrian showman, polymath, and artist André Heller, Luna Luna made its debut in Hamburg, Germany, in the summer of 1987. Blurring the lines between an amusement park and an art museum, it showcased rides, attractions, interactive installations, games, and performances crafted by over 30 acclaimed artists, including Sonia Delaunay, Salvador Dalí, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, David Hockney, Rebecca Horn, and Roy Lichtenstein. It was a radical and unprecedented collaboration of artists from diverse art movements such as Abstract Expressionism, Art Brut, Dada, Fluxus, Neo-Expressionism, Nouveau Réalisme, Pop Art, Surrealism, and Viennese Actionism.

Originally slated for a global tour, Luna Luna faced legal entanglements and storage confinement following a change of ownership after its Hamburg debut. The artworks, featuring a full-size Ferris wheel by Basquiat, a carousel by Haring, and the Enchanted Tree pavilion by Hockney, remained hidden for over three decades, causing Luna Luna to inexplicably fade into obscurity. In early 2022, a team led by rap idol Drake’s unconventional entertainment company, DreamCrew, acquired the entire contents of the original presentation. They transported it to a Los Angeles warehouse, where a team of experts, led by Rosa Lowinger for conservation and Joel Searles for reassembly, meticulously reconstructed the works.

experience rides by david hocney, salvador Dalí and more

The show weaves together history and spectacle, offering both entertainment and education. The exhibition showcases artist-conceived rides and attractions, multimedia displays featuring archival materials delving into Luna Luna’s context and inspiration, and glimpses into the intricate process of reassembling the works. Visitors are able to access David Hockney’s Enchanted Tree and Salvador Dalí’s Dalídom. In addition, André Heller’s Wedding Chapel allows guests to wed anyone or anything of their choosing. In a nod to the original Luna Luna’s spirit, wandering performers and immersive music enhance the visitor experience.

Salvador Dalí, Dalídom (interior view). Luna Luna, Hamburg, Germany, 1987. courtesy Luna Luna LLC

Jean-Michel Basquiat, painted Ferris wheel. Luna Luna, Hamburg, Germany, 1987 © Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat/licensed by Artestar, New York | photo: © Sabina Sarnitz courtesy Luna Luna LLC

aerial view of Luna Luna in Moorweide park. Hamburg, Germany, 1987 | photo: © Sabina Sarnitz courtesy Luna Luna, LLC

project info: 

name: Luna Luna Forgotten Fantasy location: Ace Mission Studios, Los Angeles

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Luna Luna ‘art amusement park’ to return for global tour in 2023

Words:  Bea Mitchell

| 2 min read

Canadian rapper Drake has invested $100m  to restore the art park .

Luna Luna, described as the world’s first travelling art amusement park , is being restored for a global tour starting in North America in 2023.

The brainchild of Austrian artist Andé Heller, Luna Luna debuted in 1987 with rides, games and fairground attractions designed by artists including Salvador Dalí, Jean-Michel Basquiat, David Hockney, Keith Haring and Roy Lichtenstein.

“The first-ever art amusement park, Luna Luna invited over 30 of the era’s most dazzling artists to design rides, games, and other fairground attractions in the summer of 1987,” said Luna Luna.

1987 travelling art fairground restored

“Now 35 years after its Hamburg debut, Luna Luna is making an electrifying return, soon embarking on a global tour with artists old and new.”

After opening in Hamburg, Germany in the 1980s, Luna Luna was slated for a global tour. Instead, it was packed up and “hidden within a graveyard of shipping container tombs”.

Canadian rapper Drake has invested $100 million to restore the art park. “When I first heard about Luna Luna I was blown away,” he said in a statement.

“It’s such a unique and special way to experience art ,” he added. “This is a big idea and opportunity that centres around what we love most: bringing people together.”

Rides by Hockney, Haring and Basquiat

Original attractions included a carousel by Keith Haring, Basquiat’s Ferris wheel , and a geometric forest pavilion by David Hockney. These are being “restored to their former glory”, alongside various carnival games, rides and installations.

In addition, the returning park will offer new carnival-style attractions designed by today’s most influential artists. Highlights also include art workshops, film screenings, special events and F&B.

Luna Luna is due to open in Los Angeles in late 2023 before embarking on a tour of North America and then the world.

Images: Luna Luna

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Bea Mitchell

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The 'world's first art amusement park' rides again

With attractions by jean-michel basquiat, sonia delaunay, david hockney, roy lichtenstein and others, the resurrected luna luna opens in los angeles this month.

In-progress assembly of Arik Brauer’s Carousel (1987) at the Luna Luna warehouse, Los Angeles Photo: Courtesy Luna Luna

This month, a landmark if quirky project billed as “the world's first art amusement park” will be resurrected on the edge of downtown Los Angeles. In the summer of 1987, Luna Luna was built in a park in Hamburg, Germany, featuring an astonishing array of celebrated artists creating the signage, rides and pavilions—among them Jean-Michel Basquiat, Sonia Delaunay, Keith Haring, David Hockney, Roy Lichtenstein, Joseph Beuys and Rebecca Horn. It drew more than 240,000 visitors and garnered international press coverage. Then it lost its funding, folded and disappeared.

Through a number of twists and turns, the amusement park will now return as Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy , with a facelift and some added attractions. Unfortunately, visitors will not be able to ride most of the historic and fragile rides.

Aerial view of Luna Luna in Moorweide park, Hamburg, Germany, 1987 Photo: © Sabina Sarnitz, courtesy Luna Luna

“Luna Luna is so remarkable within art history, not just because of how well-known the artists were,” says Lumi Tan, the new amusement park's curatorial director, “but what the project represented: the breaking down of barriers between art movements, disciplines and generations; a truly successful ability to make the avant-garde accessible and the prescient desire to immerse an audience completely in a sensorial experience.” (With current appetites for immersive experiences, updating such a project must have proved an attractive commercial endeavour as well.)

The original Luna Luna was the brainchild of André Heller, an Austrian artist and actor turned impresario, who managed to persuade around 30 artists to sign on to a popular form of public entertainment, the amusement park. Among them were several musicians, such as Miles Davis and Philip Glass, who granted use of their works. To underwrite the project, Heller obtained about $350,000 from the German magazine Neue Revue , and travelled to find and court his artists. Luckily, he had a keen eye for those whose work would withstand the test of time. There were artists who were already established, like Salvador Dalí, and others whose stars were on the rise—Kenny Scharf, for example.

In-progress assembly of Kenny Scharf’s painted chair-swing ride at the Luna Luna warehouse, Los Angeles Photo: Courtesy Luna Luna

As Heller himself admits in a book that accompanied his project, it was a miracle he got the artists to participate—and for less money than would be expected. Scharf tells The Art Newspaper that the $10,000 fee was low, but “we were told it would travel to all these other places, and end up in New York by the United Nations”. While some artists sent in designs that were executed in absentia, Scharf made his way to VIenna, where he created his work. “I spent a month in a cold warehouse,” says Scharf, who made a series of geometric characters that lined a walkway as well as a chair-swing ride festooned with colourful panels and other whimsical decorations.

Eventually, Luna Luna was set up in a park in Hamburg, and Scharf recalls how exciting it was to see, though it rained throughout the opening—“a big muddy mess", he says. More unfortunate still was that Heller lost his funding despite high attendance figures, and at the end of the summer, everything was packed up and put into storage. In 2007, the crates ended up in a warehouse in rural Texas. In early 2022, DreamCrew, an entertainment business founded by the Canadian rap superstar Drake and producer Adel "Future" Nur, purchased the whole kit and kaboodle, and moved it to Los Angeles, where it has been undergoing restoration. (The estimated cost of the project thus far, including purchase price, is $100m.)

Performers in front of Sonia Delaunay’s entrance archway and Luna Luna sign, Hamburg, Germany, 1987 Photo: © Sabina Sarnitz, courtesy Luna Luna

Now 62, but still wielding spray paint, Kenny Scharf is filmed by his daughter

Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy will be located indoors—inside two warehouses in a 60,000 sq. ft complex. About half of the 30 or so original installations will be on display, including Hockney's enchanted forest, Dalí’s geodesic dome mirrored on the inside, Scharf's chair-swing ride and Delaunay's painterly abstractions on the entry archway. (As Heller explains in his book, he had met with and gotten Delaunay's approval before she died in 1979.) Most of these are for viewing only, due to their fragility. Not to worry, however—there will be new rides which one can take for a spin. There will also be performers circulating throughout, and of course, food and souvenirs for purchase.

"Projects that I've done, that artists do—you put everything into it," Scharf says. "You're devastated when they die. And then, if you stay alive long enough, sometimes they might not be dead after all."

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Rapper Drake breathes new life into Luna Luna – a carnival of great artists

• Oops! Something went wrong. Please try again later. More content below

An art theme park featuring a mirrored funhouse by Salvador Dali and an enchanted forest by David Hockney is set to reopen after almost four decades with the backing of a superstar rapper.

Canadian hip-hop artist Drake ’s company DreamCrew has invested the majority of an estimated $100 million (£79 million) into Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy, which is set to open in Los Angeles this month.

The immersive exhibition will resurrect a 1987 Hamburg fairground with creations handcrafted by some of the world’s biggest artists. The art relics, which include a glass labyrinth by Roy Lichtenstein, a ferris wheel by Jean-Michel Basquiat and a Keith Haring-designed merry-go-round with seats shaped like cartoon characters, have for years been languishing in shipping containers in the Texas desert.

In 2022, DreamCrew bought the entire collection for an undisclosed sum. It was then packaged up and shipped to California.

While some of the attractions, such as Hockney’s forest and Dali’s dome, are expected to be open to visitors, rides such as Basquiat’s ferris wheel are likely to be operating but will not be safe for guests to ride on.

“When I first heard about Luna Luna I was blown away,” Drake said in a statement to The New York Times.

“It’s such a unique and special way to experience art. This is a big idea and an opportunity that centres around what we love most: bringing people together.”

Austrian artist André Heller, 76, created Luna Luna in the 1980s with the investment of a German magazine. After securing the funding, he visited his dream list of artists to convince them to play a part in the creation.

Dream list of artists

Many of the works were made in Europe using vintage carnival equipment and hundreds of workers from the Viennese opera and theatre community.

It is estimated around 250,000 people visited the fairground in 1987. Mr Heller had hoped Luna Luna would then tour the world but his plans fell apart. Three years later he agreed to sell the whole project for around $6 million to the Stephen and Mary Birch Foundation, who had hoped to show it in San Diego.

Because of complications, the plans were never executed and Luna Luna was moved to rural Texas in 2007, where it was left untouched for another 15 years.

Creative director Michael Goldberg first discovered Luna Luna in 2019 and became obsessed with the project during the Covid pandemic. He then pitched the idea to Drake and his team. “Within a 30-second conversation of ‘this existed’, we were all in,” Mr Gonzales said.

Adel Nur, Drake’s manager, said the rapper “got it the fastest”. He added: “He buys what he likes in terms of art and has homes around the world place those pieces in. He’s always had an eye for great things and he’s a big thinker. He sees something like this and his brain activates right away.”

Mr Goldberg floated Drake’s involvement with Mr Heller’s son, Ferdinand, who told his father to seriously consider the proposal. Mr Heller began researching Drake by “listening to his music, watching his attitudes” and decided to press ahead with the idea.

“Drake’s done everything at the highest level,” Anthony Gonzales, chief executive of Luna Luna and a partner in Drake’s DreamCrew, said, “and scale is something that he does better than anybody.

“This is a massive undertaking with huge logistical aspects, tons of moving parts. But it doesn’t seem overwhelming in my mind in any way whatsoever. It’s just like, ‘Let’s go and execute it.’”

Magic of childhood

Luna Luna was “special” to Keith Haring, who died in 1990 at the age of 31, Gil Vazquez, president of the Keith Haring Foundation, told the Los Angeles Times. “Reflecting on his own memories of times at amusement parks I’m sure brought back the magic of childhood that resonated deeply with him.”

Basquiat’s sister, Lisane, said: “Jean-Michel loved play and fun … he enjoyed amusement parks and experienced them frequently as a child growing up in New York and, specifically, Brooklyn. Amusement parks were completely on brand for him, albeit an unusual place for him and his friends to collaborate.”

Mr Heller will no longer be involved himself after the Australian magazine Falter linked the curator to cutting up Basquiat drawings to create a frame that was later presented for sale as an original. Mr Heller said it was a childish prank but decided he could not remain hands-on with the project.

The process of creating Luna Luna is being made into a documentary. The exhibition is expected to run until spring 2024.

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• Guided tour

Moscow: City Sightseeing by Car/Bus

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Visiting a new city is akin to going on a first date, it is something you will never forget. Many people imagine Moscow as just a bunch of sporadic landmarks: Red Square, the Kremlin, Lenin’s Mausoleum and GUM. There is so much more to this wonderful city than that and even though we only have a few hours, we will do all we can to show you everything we know and love about our capital in one fell swoop. We will take you on a journey through the ages, from centuries ago, right up to the modern day, soaking in the sights of this vast and bustling metropolis. Bright, luxurious and both ancient and modern at the same time, Moscow invites you on a date you’ll never forget!

On our sightseeing bus tour of the city, you will see:

• The wonderfully historic city centre and its unique museums, magnificent cathedrals, the exquisite Chambers of the Romanov Boyars and of course, the famous towering red brick walls of the Kremlin, The charming beauty of the Alexander Garden awaits the capital's guests - a lush green oasis in the midst of the glass and concrete clad metropolis, basking in the etherial aura emanating from the whitewashed stone walls of the restored Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, the world- renowned fairytale onion domes of St. Basil's Cathedral and other impressive monumental buildings such as the library built in Lenin's honour - the Russian State Library - and the State Duma.
• The Lubyanka KGB headquarters is notorious to members of older generations and although nowadays, the face of the secret police has changed dramatically, the looming enigmatic building on the waterfront maintains its aura of mystery, shrouded in a variety of murky rumours and dark myths. Then, there’s another of Moscow's main attractions - the marvellous Bolshoi Theatre, yew simply cant leave Moscow without taking in its breathtaking architecture. Engrained in the fabric of Russia's cultural heritage, virtuoso performers such as prima ballerina Galina Ulanova, opera singer Feodor Chaliapin and pianist, composer and conductor Sergei Rachmaninoff once stood centre stage of this vaunted institution.
• The memorial complex on Poklonnaya Hill was constructed in the glory and honour of our heroes who defended our nation in the many crucial battles of the Great Patriotic War (WWII). This is a place that embodies a particularly acute and inextricable link between older ancf younger generations. Moving on to the Moscow International Business Centre, not dubbed ‘Moscow City' for nothing, a true glimpse of the future in the present. This incredible, rather jaw-dropping project in the capital has shown that Moscow has come to accept the age of the skyscraper. Finally, the stunning views from the observation deck at Sparrow Hills will leave professional and amateur photographers alike itching to capture them. How could one resist?

The most beautiful of all the world's cities - lady Moscow invites you out on a date!

The cost of an excursion with a personal guide for 1 person

Meeting point We'll pick you up at your hotel

St. Basil's Cathedral

House on the Embankment

Cathedral of Christ the Saviour

Vorobyovy Hills

Poklonnaya Hill Poklonnaya Gora

Moscow-City

Alexander garden

Russian State Library

Bolshoi Theatre

End of the tour

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• Excursion Moscow: City Sightseeing by Car/Bus
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