Keller & Keller

The first thing that catches your eye might be a car-flattened Coca-Cola can encrusted in red Swarovski crystal in the storefront window. Walk in, and you’ll see one wall with more smashed and bedazzled cans, between which hang dandyish jacket fronts festooned with whimsical brooches. Look closely. One includes a pull tab.

The brooches belonged to Sam Keller's uncle Richard Keller, a professor and self-taught artist who died in 1994 from AIDS. He made them from detritus he found on the streets of Paris. He also made collages that could be tender, strange, and explicitly homoerotic.

Like his uncle, Sam makes art from things most people throw away. He recently built the White House out of McDonald's fries and called it Ancient Grease (2026).

He calls this exhibition a collaboration (hence the title Keller & Keller), and it’s inspired by a portfolio Sam discovered that is filled with hundreds of magazine clippings Richard had saved for collages he never got to make. The collages that make up the second half of the show are Sam’s way of picking up the conversation.

He’s folded his uncle's cut-outs into new collages where the American dream is blowing apart: cut-up ads, car brochures, space-program glossies, and the California flag. There’s even the Statue of Liberty loaded into a cannon.

Sam's work has long found the joke inside the object. Here, trash becomes treasure. And unfinished ideas get a second life.

Kind of magic, right?

Sam Keller (b. New York, 1986) lives and works in Los Angeles. He studied art at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) and the Cranbrook Academy in Michigan. His practice turns discarded food, packaging, and consumer objects into glittering, funny, and politically loaded sculptures.

Richard Keller (1938–1994), Sam’s uncle, was a self-taught artist who worked in collage, drawing, painting, and found-object sculpture while teaching linguistics and translation at the Sorbonne.