An art gallery in Los Angeles will soon unveil a pop-up museum dedicated entirely to the O.J. Simpson murder trial and the ‘kind of gross’ memorabilia it created.
For US$5, people can peruse O.J. Simpson board games, a pocket knife embossed with a Ford Bronco and a phone card that says “Juice: 100 per cent not guilty.”
There will also be a collection of more than 60 bootleg T-shirts, which were sold outside the courthouse where Simpson was acquitted in the 1994 deaths of Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown.
Adam Papagan, who offers O.J. Simpson tours, is curating the exhibit, which will run from August 18 to 22 at the Coagula Curatorial Gallery.
“When the murder trial happened, all of these people took it upon themselves to make these (do-it-yourself) O.J. products, just to make a quick buck,” Papagan told CTV News Channel.
“It’s just very strange that a murder trial prompted all of this,” he says.
“It’s kind of gross if you think about it,” he adds.
Papagan, who grew up not far from Simpson’s mansion in Brentwood, Calif., says that the exhibit will make people think about America’s fascination with celebrity.
“People don’t realize just how engrained into our popular culture this thing has become,” he says. “In other parts of the world, people view this as the quintessential American tragedy.”
Papagan has been collecting Simpson memorabilia for years and has long been planning for months to do an exhibition, but says interest increased after Simpson was granted parole earlier this month, after serving part of his sentence for a 2007 robbery and kidnapping.
“The parole hearing happened and everyone started seeming excited about O.J. again,” Papagan says. “We’ve obviously learned nothing through all these years.”
It’s not the first time O.J. Simpson’s trial has been featured in a museum. The journalism-focused Newseum in Washington, D.C., ran an exhibit in 2010 called “Trial of the Century” that included the tan Armani suit and gold tie that Simpson wore on the day he was acquitted.
