For the 30th Anniversary Red Ball Gala of the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky was commissioned to design a bicycle with Santa Cruz Bicycles, the legendary California bicycle manufacturer based in Santa Cruz.
The bike will be launched at the gala on April 11, 2026 as a Limited Edition bike called The Iron Rider Edition.
RED GALA BALL INFO
Artist Statement
”When I put a bicycle wheel on a stool, the fork down, there was no idea of a 'ready-made' or anything else. It was just a distraction. I didn't have any special reason to do it, or any intention of showing it or describing anything.
Marcel DuchampThe Ready Made Bicycle Wheel, 1913
Long before the quiet hum of the modern electric car, it was the bicycle that first taught us to reimagine the rhythm of the 20th-century city. It was the original machine of urban freedom, charting a distinctly human-powered path through the streets.
For this project, I wanted to trace the poetry of those spinning wheels—how artists like Marcel Duchamp took a simple bicycle wheel and forever fractured the boundaries of art history, and how Einstein found the universe unfolding in his mind during the gentle, rhythmic cadence of a ride. There’s even the fact that bicycles formed way the Wright Brothers who invented modern aviation and transformed the way we think of the skies – they were bike mechanics and owned their bike company.
The Wright brothers, Orville and Wilbur, directly applied their experience as bicycle manufacturers to aviation, utilizing bike parts, chains, and sprockets in their 1903 flyer, and incorporating structural design principles like light-weight, durable engineering. Their “bicycle-like” thinking enabled them to solve the problem of controlled, 3-axis flight. It’s kind of like that phrase “like learning to ride a bike” cut through the air – literally. That sensibility informs my project.
As if that wasn’t enough, the bicycle’s DNA is woven deeply into the visual language of our world. It pulses through the mixed-media brilliance of camouflage, echoing into the fragmented energy of Cubism, the breathless speed of Futurism, and the vibrant pulse of modern urban art to inspire a new kind of kineticism.
For decades, Santa Cruz Bikes has mastered the alchemy of high-performance riding, a passion I’ve carried in my own bones since I was a child. Collaborating with them felt like catching the perfect tailwind. Their frames became the canvas and the launchpad for a project designed to rethink our journey—from the concrete arteries of the city to the wild heartbeat of the trails, and back again.
And like the horizon unfolding from the saddle, this is only the beginning. Like Duchamp said so long ago when he thought about the infinite possibilities the spinning wheel evoked: “To set the wheel turning was… a sort of opening of avenues on other things than material life.”
Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky
Livingston Manor, 2026
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