Darby Allin, Raymond Pettibon, Charlie Ramone: 52W HARDWAY

Awesome Championship Wrestling Presents

52W HARDWAY: LIVE WRESTLING NIGHTS
TNT Champion Darby Allin will be performing live wrestling matches inside a ring installed within the 52 Walker gallery space. Along with Allin, wrestlers Killer Kross, Steven Borden, Sid Ellington, Kiran Grey, Timothy Thatcher, and others will be performing (along with surprise musical performances).

NIGHT ONE | October 3, 2025
Standing room only. Buy tickets here.

NIGHT TWO | October 10, 2025
Standing room only. Buy tickets here.

Full Press Release

52 Walker and Awesome Championship Wrestling are pleased to announce 52W HARDWAY, the gallery’s “sixteenth-and-a-half” exhibition, which will feature drawings by Raymond Pettibon related to his lifelong interest in professional wrestling.  Organized by Ebony L. Haynes, this two-week-only presentation—part exhibition, part event—will also see Pettibon’s friend and former two-time AEW (All Elite Wrestling) TNT Champion Darby Allin perform in live wrestling matches occurring on October 3 and 10 inside a ring installed within the gallery during the run of the show. Each performance night will also include live music and undercard bouts, organized by Allin, spotlighting up-and-coming figures in the sport. On view alongside Pettibon’s works will be drawings and wrestling props created by artist, designer, and wrestling specialist Charlie Ramone, who is widely known in the sport for his pivotal behind-the-scenes roles. 

The show’s title, “Hardway,” refers to when a wrestler gets busted open by accident. It could be a stray punch to the head that causes a gash, a slice from a broken piece of a weapon, or anything that causes accidental bleeding. More often than not, a hardway injury is gruesome, shocking, and unsettling because it’s real. This rupture—where the performative nature of the match is pierced by something raw and truly violent—speaks to the heart of this exhibition, as seen in the works of Pettibon and Ramone and the matches featuring Allin, who has made his name in the sport for his extreme and often risky maneuvers.

Just as a hardway injury disrupts the illusion of control in the ring, Pettibon’s representations of the sport take up its stylized characters and violence as a way to scrutinize and satirize American myths of masculinity, power, and spectacle. Across the exhibited works, deeper cultural tensions play out and intermingle, and boundaries between truth and falsehood, danger and safety, performance and reality become increasingly—and disconcertingly—blurred.