When I first sculpted Ziggy, I didn’t know he’d end up in a museum—let alone as part of an exhibition honoring David Bowie himself. And yet, here he is: my bronze sculpture Ziggy is on view through September 28 at the Santa Monica Art Museum in the beautifully curated exhibition, A Day with David Bowie.
The story of this piece begins with a collaboration that sparked something unexpected. A few years ago, I worked with my friend Jota Leal, a gifted portrait painter known for his surreal and psychologically charged caricatures. Jota painted a version of Bowie that stretched and amplified the icon’s angular features—turning his face into a poetic exaggeration of the alien charisma we all remember. Something about that image got under my skin. It wasn’t just a portrait—it was an invitation. I could see the sculpture forming before I’d even picked up a tool.
That’s how my bronze Ziggy came to life—not as a likeness, but as a sculptural riff on Jota’s wild, expressive vision. I leaned into the myth: the pointed ears, the elongated jawline, the hollow, watching eyes. This wasn’t just David Bowie—it was Ziggy Stardust, reimagined as a space-age oracle frozen in time. Otherworldly, but still human.
To now see Ziggy installed in A Day with David Bowie is something I’m deeply proud of. The exhibition itself is centered on a quiet, powerful series of black-and-white photographs by Christine de Grancy, taken during Bowie’s 1994 visit to the Art Brut Center in Gugging, Austria. In those images, we see a different side of Bowie—not the showman, but the seeker. He sits in silence, smokes, observes. He listens to outsider artists with genuine curiosity and respect. That atmosphere of intimate reflection is the perfect setting for this piece, born from a collaboration that honored Bowie’s own gift for transformation.
The museum has done a beautiful job letting the work breathe. De Grancy’s photographs offer stillness. And nearby, the museum's companion exhibit Spectacle adds another layer, with 60 large-format images from National Geographic on view—offering scale, grandeur, and global context. The Santa Monica Art Museum is open Wednesday through Friday from 12–8 p.m., and weekends from 10–8 p.m. It’s fully accessible, and private visits can be arranged.
I hope you’ll visit if you’re in the Los Angeles area. For me, this exhibition isn't just about David Bowie—it's about creative exchange, about reinvention, about letting one artist’s vision evolve through the hands of another. From Jota’s surreal brushstrokes to my sculpted bronze, Ziggy came into being as part of a shared dialogue. Now, he’s part of another: a collective tribute to the man who taught us all to embrace the strange, the beautiful, and the otherworldly.
And if you find yourself standing in front of Ziggy, I hope you feel it—that hum of transformation, the invitation to imagine, and the echo of an artist who never stopped becoming.
