The Museum of Modern Art in New York is currently presenting Stephen Prina: A Lick and a Promise, a wide-ranging survey that highlights the artist’s decades-long engagement with performance, sound, and conceptual art. Running through December 13, 2025, the exhibition underscores Prina’s ability to dissolve boundaries between music, spoken word, and visual art.
The show includes a restaging of Beat of the Traps, a collaborative performance originally conceived in the early 1990s with Mike Kelley and Anita Pace. Because the work was never formally recorded, MoMA’s version functions as both a reconstruction and a new creation, drawing attention to the ephemeral nature of performance and the impossibility of fully capturing its essence. This layering of past and present is typical of Prina’s practice, which often interrogates the role of memory and translation in art.
Visitors can expect an environment that shifts between gallery and stage. Musical scores, video elements, and archival traces sit alongside live performances, creating a sense that the show itself is never fixed. Prina’s work resists easy categorization: one moment it feels like an avant-garde concert, the next like a conceptual puzzle, and then like a personal meditation on culture and history.
The title A Lick and a Promise suggests a quick gesture, a phrase often used to describe doing something hastily. Here it becomes a metaphor for the fleeting quality of performance, the impossibility of perfection, and the idea that every work of art carries within it an unfinished quality. For MoMA, the exhibition offers an opportunity to reaffirm the importance of performance art within its broader collection. For visitors, it is a chance to experience art that is alive, unpredictable, and rooted in the here and now.
