AMERICAN WAX is a fine art project by Art Kingdom and Topps and partnering with select celebrity endorsements. It focuses on the visual art of Topps bubble gum cards from 1953-1993.
Bubble gum cards are vintage trading cards that were sold typically in wax paper packs with a stick of bubble gum. Popularised by Topps and propelled by the success of their Bazooka Bubble Gum, they were originally designed to market gum to kids, but the cards quickly became the main attraction.
Topps evolved into one of the most recognisable names in American popular culture with its wax paper packs becoming a familiar part of childhood for millions. With wax packs, Topps created a system through which popular culture could be experienced and circulate at scale. The company did not simply distribute trading cards; it distributed anticipation, imagination, wishes and exchange. These small disposable packs became part of the ritual of growing up.
American Wax examines the industrial objects through which Topps helped share popular culture through personal items that were collected, carried and traded. Long before social media and digital fandom, Topps wax paper trading card packs carried these fragments of cinema, television, sport and advertising into everyday life. Sold worldwide in supermarkets, newsagents and convenience stores at enormous scale.
While the cards themselves were collected, the pack artwork became something else entirely. Designed to be opened and discarded, the wrappers became visual shorthand for the worlds they contained. Through illustration, typography and graphic design, Topps condensed entire cultural universes into a single image. Long after the packaging had disappeared, those images remained fixed in memory, becoming inseparable from the characters, stories and mythology they represented.
American Wax isolates these images and presents them at scale. When enlarged, their graphic and material systems become visible - typography, colour separation, printing techniques, paper wear, folding and sealing all become art.
The project examines artefacts that were designed to disappear but became cultural artefacts. It explores the physical infrastructure through which popular culture once travelled. It celebrates the role the Topps company played in building it. The enduring power of many Topps properties rests not only in the cards themselves, but in the visual memory of the pack artwork that introduced them. Films became collectable. Stories became tradeable. Characters moved beyond the screen into pockets, bedrooms and school bags.
In addition to the image itself, American Wax incorporates the object that delivered the image: the iconic Topps wax paper pack that became the visual identity of the world inside. Human societies have always exchanged stories of heroes, legends and archetypes. In earlier cultures these stories circulated through oral traditions, repeated within communities and passed from one generation to the next. Trading cards represent a modern continuation of that human impulse.
Through wax packs, fragments of contemporary stories, film characters, sports heroes, cultural icons and even political figures moved physically through shops, and into homes and defining childhood.
The wax pack can therefore be understood not only as packaging, but as a distribution mechanism for modern cultural mythology.
WAX PACKS AS ART
American Wax sits within a clear lineage in contemporary art.
Warhol elevated commercial imagery to the status of art. In the 1960s, Andy Warhol elevated the visual language of consumer culture by bringing everyday commercial imagery into the space of fine art. The Campbell’s Soup Cans demonstrated how advertising, branding, and repetition had become central to modern visual culture.
Richard Prince later rephotographed advertising imagery, removing it from its original context to interrogate authorship and American identity. Prince rephotographed advertising imagery in his Cowboys series, isolating images from their original commercial context and examining the myths embedded within them.
Later artists explored similar territory through appropriation. Ed Ruscha documented the graphic language of the American landscape through photographs and printed works that treated signage, typography, and commercial graphics as high art.
More recent artists have continued to explore how images move through cultural systems. Christian Marclay has assembled fragments of recorded media to examine the circulation of sound and image within contemporary culture, while Adam Pendleton has incorporated archival material and historical documents into installations that investigate how visual material is transmitted, reproduced, and reinterpreted over time.
American wax moves one step further shifting attention from the image itself to the mechanisms through which images circulated, a cultural delivery system, a small industrial container. Where Pop Art examined consumer imagery, American Wax examines the physical mechanism that distributed it.
CULTURAL ARCHAEOLOGY
The project is framed as an act of cultural archaeology. Wax packs were never designed to endure. They were produced in vast quantities and intended to disappear within minutes of purchase, yet many survived in memory and in collections.
By focusing upon and enlarging these objects, American Wax transforms disposable packaging into evidence of a specific historical moment, a period when American popular culture operated with extraordinary confidence and reach.
The work is not about nostalgia. It is about examining the artefacts of the late twentieth century image economy and recognising the role Topps became as its most influential distributor.
AUTHORSHIP
The imagery on these packs was produced by anonymous commercial designers working inside corporate systems. They were not created as art.
American Wax raises a familiar question in postmodern art:
Where does authorship reside?
With the original designer?
With the culture that produced the object?
With the artist who reframes it?
This places the project within the broader tradition of appropriation and image recontextualisation.
This question sits within a recognised lineage of artists who have examined massproduced imagery and the systems through which it circulates.
American Wax works with authenticated signatures from individuals intrinsically tied to the cultural identity of the original property. These signatures are not intended as celebrity endorsements. Each signatory has been selected because of their direct relationship to the authorship, identity, memory or mythology associated with the work itself. In some cases, the connection is one of authorship. In others it is performance, stewardship or cultural association. Together they reflect the different ways mythology is created, transmitted and remembered.
SCALE
Scale is the primary artistic intervention.
The wax pack was originally a disposable object roughly the size of a hand. Enlarged beyond its original size, the wax pack's material and graphic systems become legible. Details that once went unnoticed such as print alignment, colour layering, wear and folds all become visual events.
The work asks viewers to reconsider an object they once overlooked.
ARCHIVE
American Wax should also be understood as an archive. The project documents a defining period in the history of Topps and the distribution of American popular imagery between 1953 and 1993. Each pack is a fragment of a much larger system - film studios, television networks sports leagues and consumer brands, a visual record of how culture once arrived in the hand.
GALLERY STRATEGY
The project will operate across three distinct tiers.
Institutional/museum original works drawn from the most culturally significant packs. Each artwork will be presented as a large format, hand painted original typically 6ft by 4ft in size.
Unique editions presented as part of the archival record of American mass media. A combination of printing and hand painted elements presented and displayed within PSA grading style frames.
Commercial editions more accessibly priced, print based editions to expand the reach of the project and distributed through gallery commercial gallery partners.
INSTALLATION
The work will be presented with the seriousness of an archive or typology.
Possible formats include installations that treat packs as a visual taxonomy of American culture.
Chronological walls tracing the development of popular media from the 1960s to the late 1980s.
Vitrines containing the original sealed packs alongside the large-scale works.
This reinforces the idea that the project documents a cultural system rather than celebrating nostalgia.
The exhibition includes a single archive vitrine containing original objects from the retail and everyday environment in which wax packs circulated.
Series One
AMERICAN WAX honouring STAR WARS
Star Wars (1977)
Empire Strikes Back (1980)
Return of the Jedi (1983)
Few works illustrate the scale and reach of late twentieth-century American image culture more completely than Star Wars. The original Topps wax packs transformed a cinematic
universe into a mass-distributed handheld object, allowing characters, vehicles and iconography to circulate far beyond the screen itself.
LAUNCHING AUTUMN 2027 for the 50th Anniversary of STAR WARS
Series one will be presented as follows:
3 hand-painted originals of each artwork (183 x 122cm), Star Wars, Empire Strikes Back & Return of the Jedi.
An edition of 195 hand-crafted artworks (60 x 50cm) on japanese awigami kozo paper, each beautifully encapsulated in acrylic cases (108 x 84cm) with replica PSA (professional sports authenticator https://www.psacard.com) style title cards relating to the art.
Each artwork thus produced will provide the ability to create an edition of highly collectable, gradable, and tradable pieces hosted on a dedicated online platform for the series.
