😶🌫️ RE-IMAGINE II — Ron English x Clutter Gallery (Beacon, NY • 2021*) #00014 — TNoTToys Publications

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📚 This Is Not a Book About Art Toy Exhibitions & ToyCons

Our Upcoming Art Toy Book: 1000 Iconic ArTToy Exhibitions

Context

The sequel came almost like déjà vu. Same gallery. Same artist. But the world had shifted again. The first RE-IMAGINE cracked open icons in the middle of a pandemic pause. The second, RE-IMAGINE II, proved it wasn’t a one-time ritual but the beginning of a series: a calendar of mutations.

Curiously, the POSTER carried the same date as the first show: June 15 – July 3, 2020. A typo, a ghost in the design. But maybe fitting. Because this sequel was less about linear time and more about repetition, contamination, and the way pop symbols refuse to die.

POSTER Reading. POSTER Analysis.

What the image really says

Two creatures dominate the POSTER . Their bodies recall the most famous mouse in history, but twisted, swollen, decomposed. Mickey reimagined as monster.

The heads grin with English’s trademark dental menace. Eyes rimmed in red pulse with chemical unease. Their torsos bulge, clothes torn, and one even sprouts a reptilian spine; part cartoon, part dinosaur, part toxic hallucination.

The colors scream in contradiction: candy pinks, lime greens, aquatic blues. Shades we’re trained to associate with joy, turned here into signs of rot. It’s the language of advertising weaponized against itself, classic Ron English Popaganda.

Typography seals the intent: RE-IMAGINE II, bold and declarative. A sequel, a continuation. The promise that this act of re-coding culture will not be a one-off, but a ritual. And the footnote matters too: Original Drawings & More by Ron English. This is not just community hacking; it’s the master himself feeding the fire.

The POSTER doesn’t illustrate the show. It contaminates it, right from the start.

The Exhibition

If the first RE-IMAGINE targeted classical icons like the Mona Lisa, this second aimed straight at the corporate heart: Mickey Mouse. The most sanitized, franchised, and monetized character in pop culture, here disassembled into grotesque vinyl.

Over thirty artists joined in again, some returning from the first edition, others new to the lineup. Together they took the same base platform and bent it into dozens of alternate realities. Some playful, some unsettling, all mutations of a brand that once sold innocence.

Ron English’s own works anchored the show: original drawings and fresh customs alongside the community’s contributions. The Gallery floor became a battlefield where advertising mascots, childhood memories, and cultural critique clashed in vinyl form.

Clutter Gallery, with its hybrid model of controlled physical visits and strong online presence, once again turned limitations into fuel. Collectors lined up digitally and physically, proving that even under constraints, the hunger for ArT Toys, especially when they expose the mechanics of pop culture, only grows stronger.

Why It Mattered. What the exhibition shows

RE-IMAGINE II didn’t simply repeat the first. It escalated it.

The focus shifted from Art history to corporate mythology. From the Mona Lisa to Mickey. From cultural heritage to cultural monopoly. By corrupting the mouse, the Show aimed at the bloodstream of global branding, reminding us that behind every cute mascot there’s a machine of consumption.

And the choice of platform, a mouse body with a grin and a spine, turned the message into plastic flesh. These weren’t nostalgic collectibles. They were warnings. Evidence of what happens when symbols are stretched too far, consumed too long, left to rot under their own marketing weight.

The Exhibition showed that ArT Toys can be more than satire. They can be an antidote. A way of holding toxic icons in your hand, acknowledging their power, and reprogramming them into something else.

Legacy & Mutation

The legacy of RE-IMAGINE II lies in continuity. The first proved that icons could be rewritten. The second proved that rewriting can become ritual. A series. A pattern of mutation.

And the typo on the POSTER ? Call it a glitch, or call it prophecy. The same date as the first show, as if to suggest these re-imaginings are not events locked in time but cycles. Each year, same calendar, new mutations.

Clutter Gallery has cemented its role as the stage where this ritual unfolds. From its birth as a magazine in the early 2000s to its physical gallery in Beacon since 2011, Clutter has always been more than a venue. It’s an amplifier of mutation, a space where customs turn from hobby into cultural critique.

RE-IMAGINE IIconfirmed what ArT Toy collectors already suspected: once You open the icon, you can’t close it again.

Biography in Brief

Ron English remains the prophet of Popaganda: decades spent twisting corporate mascots, street ads, and beloved symbols into something grotesque, funny, unforgettable. His smileys grin with skulls. His mascots grow obese. His saints melt into chemical spills.

Clutter Gallery remains his perfect accomplice. First as a magazine documenting the global rise of ArT Toys and lowbrow Art, then as a Gallery producing vinyl and staging custom Shows that double as manifestos. From Beacon, they’ve made mutation not just possible, but inevitable.

Together, they turned the sequel into proof: the act of re-imagining is not a one-time rebellion. It is a permanent condition of culture.

Final Thought from Art Toy Gama

Our rule of thumb: make the familiar impossible to overlook.

RE-IMAGINE II sharpened that principle. A mouse so familiar it should fade into wallpaper was split open, given a grin, a spine, a sickness. Thirty voices then took that mutation and pushed it further, until Mickey was no longer a mascot but a battlefield.

That’s the charge of ArT Toys. They don’t prettify; they pressure-test. They let us hold the corruption of icons in our hands and decide what to do with it. They show us that branding is not untouchable, that myths can be melted and recast.

We don’t collect ArT Toys. We collect reprograms. RE-IMAGINE II left us with the clearest evidence yet: culture doesn’t survive by staying intact. It survives by being hacked, again and again, until the smile rots into something unforgettable.

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