Stephen Prina (*1954) is a key member of a post-conceptualist movement that emerged in the later 1980s and 1990s, with practices rooted in everyday culture that offered critiques of social and institutional systems. Alongside contemporaries such as Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Mike Kelley, Prina developed a varied body of work that entwines allusions to art, film, music and life, which surface and resurface from one project to the next in a vast network of references. Working between Los Angeles and Cambridge, Massachusetts, Prina has influenced generations of contemporary artists through both his art and his teaching at Harvard University.
Photo: Maria Baranova © 2026 The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Beat of the Traps
Mike Kelley, Anita Pace, Stephen Prina
With Abbott Alexander, Jon Baldwin, Freeda Electra, M.B. Gordy and Butch Norton
Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles – MOCA
September 18–20, 2026
Beat of the Traps (1992), is a multidisciplinary performance created by Mike Kelley, Anita Pace, and Stephen Prina. Presented in Los Angeles for the first time since its debut in 1992, this collaborative work assembles a dance performance, a percussion recital, a rock drum solo, a music fanatic’s vaudevillian monologue about rock star excess, and the number one song on Billboard’s Hot 100 at the time of the performance.
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