Artist Tod Lippy has been following reports about art world figures who maintained friendships and correspondence with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein—even after his crimes were public—and been left with the nagging sense that the consequences have been too mild. Billionaire collector Leon Black still sits on the board of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, for example, as does Ronald Lauder. Some have stepped down—French museum director Jack Lang resigned his post, as did School of Visual Arts chair and former museum director David A. Ross—but for Lippy, the penalties haven’t gone far enough.
So on Saturday morning, as hordes descend on the Santa Monica Airport for the latest edition of Frieze Los Angeles, Lippy will send a mobile LED truck there, bearing photos and video of emails with art world figures, or that mention art world figures, that appear in the Epstein files. The title of the piece, All Of the Gang, comes from an email in which a redacted person asks Epstein if he knows megadealer Larry Gagosian. He’s the dealer to all of the gang, comes the reply, says Lippy.
Angry about the art world’s complicity, Lippy started searching for all the powerful art world people he could think of, and found plenty.
“The David A. Ross stuff is certainly the most repulsive and concerning,” said Lippy in a phone conversation. But he also found artist Andres Serrano’s coziness to the child sex trafficker troubling (including saying he would vote for Trump out of pique over the response to his “grab them by the pussy” talk), and talk of a visit to Jeff Koons’s studio bothered him. Koons, for the record, says he “did not have a relationship” with Epstein, but Lippy doesn’t buy it.
Tod Lippy, All of the Gang (2026).
The truck will start out at Frieze, where traffic will be slow along Airport Avenue. “It’s like a parking lot,” says Lippy, “so hopefully there will be time for people to see these. I can’t find a better audience.” The truck will also head out to the Post Fair in Santa Monica, through Beverly Hills, and up Camden Drive through West Hollywood, where he’ll go by a number of galleries, says Lippy. “The idea is to hit as many art communities as possible.”
Lippy hasn’t long considered himself an artist, but he made a splash at the Independent art fair in New York last year with My Fellow Americans (2025), a grouping of portraits of Trump supporters, for which he picked up a brush for the first time. As Daniel Cassady wrote in ARTnews, “what began as an attempt to understand turned into something deeper: a strange kind of communion between the artist and his subjects, a project that feels as emotional as it is political.”
Before that, he was known for the biannual, advertisement-free journal Esopus, which counted the Andy Warhol Foundation among its supporters and which he published for over twenty years. The New York Times T Magazine noted in 2013 that it was “intended to be a kind of creative platform for artists of all disciplines to exhibit their work on their terms, without the need for an intermediary.” Among other debuts, it was the place where the fantastical photos of outsider artist Mark Hogancamp first appeared.
Lippy knows he’s not breaking any news. “I’m not revealing anything that’s not public,” he concedes. “I just don’t want all this to disappear. Hopefully it will compel people to do their own searches.”
