Musician Jarvis Cocker and his wife, creative consultant Kim Sion, will curate an exhibition titled “The Hodge Podge” at the Hepworth Wakefield in the U.K., opening in May 2027. The show will feature artworks selected by the couple that challenge conventional definitions of art, spanning diverse media and time periods, with artists including Peter Doig, Barbara Hepworth, Jeremy Deller, and Emma Kunz. The exhibition will be bookended by an immersive Dreamachine, a 1959 light-art device by Brion Gysin and Ian Sommerville. Cocker and Sion have outlined their curatorial philosophy in a Hodge Podge Manifesto, celebrating beauty in chaos and disorder.
This exhibition matters because it brings a high-profile, cross-disciplinary figure—Jarvis Cocker, frontman of the band Pulp—into the museum world as a curator, potentially drawing new audiences to contemporary art. The show’s focus on outsider and visionary artists, combined with a playful, manifesto-driven approach, challenges traditional curatorial hierarchies and expands the Hepworth Wakefield’s reach beyond the art-world mainstream. It also underscores a growing trend of musicians and celebrities curating museum exhibitions, blurring boundaries between popular culture and fine art.