Internationally celebrated creative Muffinhead works as a curator, designer, performer, illustrator, tattoo artist, video artist (sometimes simultaneously). He is a co-founder of the Basement Gallery in Cincinnati and the ZTV film festival. He has been a club kid, a make-up artist, and a balloon-based fashion designer. He has even been a meme.
Muffinhead’s kaleidoscopic career led him from his birthplace of Los Angeles, to New York, and now, to Louisville. He was introduced to PORTAL co- owner Brad White — artist, fabricator, sculptor, and drummer for the noise punk band WiiRMZ — through their mutual friend, the fashion artist The Web Has No Weaver. “My eyes lit up at the space immediately and I was excited to see art hung throughout the space and through the stage area, Muffinhead says. “I’d moved out of New York during COVID and have been bopping around the South and Midwest ever since — looking for a home, really.”
In 2023, Muffinhead had created Basement Gallery, which is, exactly as is sounds, “a little gallery that my wife and I set up in our car garage and basement area.” The couple brought in artists like Jim Tozzi, Daron Nefcy, and Mike Diana to their home in Cincinnati. “It was a wonderful experience and that is how Brad White from PORTAL found out about the project and invited me to curate a show [there].”
On Friday, May 17, Muffinhead will unveil “Zing Fu: Art of the Lightning Bolt” at ARTPORTAL. This multidisciplinary exhibition presents the high-voltage symbol as its central visual motif. “Zing Fu” will feature work by more than 50 artists, including Kenny Scharf, the prolific street artist who befriended Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Mike Diana, the underground cartoonist from Florida who was the first artist in the U.S. to be convicted of obscenity, alongside local artists like psychedelic fantasy printmaker Chloe Lee and veteran graphic artist Jeff Gaither.
Muffinhead thought of the lightning bolt as an iconic symbol around which a group exhibition could be curated because “especially given the great, heavy bands that come play at the venue,” he says, “I wanted the show to look as intense and to be just as loud as the venue is. We are also in some powerful, traumatic times. I feel that the show accurately matches the energies coming at and through us.”
The changing landscape of American culture — book bans, prohibitions on drag performances, restrictions on trans healthcare — informs the way Muffinhead approaches art, but he is not slowed down by regressive regulations. “To me, art is always the resistance because it’s so honest,” he says. “My work has always had a level of direct confrontation to it and things like book banning will never stop the truth of what we are, who we are as creatives, or how we choose to communicate.”
After the opening reception for “Zing Fu,” PORTAL will host live music by Rebelmatic from New York, Cardiel from Venezuela, and Lorelei from Cincinnati. Tickets to the concert are $18. Food will provided onsite by PORTAL + ART PORTAL’s in-house taco truck, Happy Taco.
Zing Fu: Art of the Lightning Bolt
ARTPORTAL
1512 Portland Ave.
Friday, May 17
6:00 p.m.–8:00 p.m.
Free admission
This article appears in May 8-21, 2024.