For questions about Chocolate Factory please email hey@pamuseum.org

This November, ahead of its January 2027 opening, the Performance Art Museum (PAM) presents Paul McCarthy’s Chocolate Factory, bringing the artist’s continually evolving project to Los Angeles for the first time. Presented as a special limited-engagement benefit for the museum, the work transforms PAM’s industrial warehouse in Chinatown into a functioning chocolate factory where performance, sculpture, manufacturing, and commerce converge.

During public hours, outfitted workers will cast approximately 400 of McCarthy’s recurring Santa with Tree Plug and Tree Plug sculptures in chocolate each day. As the chocolates multiply, they will accumulate throughout the Performance Art Museum’s exhibition space, creating an installation that evolves over the course of the engagement.

In Collaboration with andSons Chocolatiers, a Limited Edition of 2,000 Paul McCarthy Chocolate Sculptures Are Available for Purchase.

Alongside the live production, a separate limited edition of 2,000 Paul McCarthy chocolate works will be available for purchase in person and online. Produced in Los Angeles by andSons Chocolatiers from 62% dark chocolate, the two different sculptures, Santa with Tree Plug and Tree Plug, can be purchased for $200 each. Proceeds will benefit PAM as it prepares to open in January.

First realized at Maccarone Gallery in New York in 2007, Chocolate Factory transformed the commercial gallery into a functioning manufacturing facility and retail store. Seven years later, at Monnaie de Paris, McCarthy situated the factory within the historic French mint, where chocolate figures accumulated in rooms once associated with the production of currency.

Across these iterations, Chocolate Factory has examined labor, production, consumption, and value. In Los Angeles, those questions take on another dimension. The chocolates produced inside the factory accumulate as a record of labor and repetition, while the limited edition enters circulation as an object to be purchased, collected, or consumed. An artwork concerned with the systems of commerce now participates in those same systems to help establish a new museum.

At the center of the project are forms McCarthy has returned to for decades. Santa Claus evokes childhood fantasy, generosity, and commercial desire, while the Plug shifts between Christmas tree, modernist abstraction, industrial object, and sexual reference. Rendered in chocolate, both figures occupy an uneasy space between sculpture and commodity, preservation and consumption.

Rather than an exhibition of finished objects, Chocolate Factory unfolds through the ongoing activity of production, with the process itself becoming the work. Set within PAM’s industrial space in Chinatown, the project offers an initial expression of what a museum dedicated to performance art can encompass. Its familiar imagery of chocolate and the holiday season provides an accessible entry point into McCarthy’s more complex examination of spectacle, desire, commerce, and value.

Nineteen years after McCarthy first transformed a New York gallery into a chocolate factory, the machinery is still running. This time, it is also helping build a museum.

ABOUT PAUL McCARTHY

Paul McCarthy is widely considered one of the most influential and groundbreaking contemporary American artists. Born in 1945 and raised in Salt Lake City, Utah, he first established a multifaceted artistic practice that sought to break the limitations of painting through the use of unorthodox materials, including bodily fluids and food. He has since become known for visceral, often hauntingly humorous work across a variety of mediums, from performance, photography, film and video to sculpture, drawing and painting.

McCarthy earned a BFA in painting from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1969 and an MFA in multimedia, film and art from USC in 1973. For 18 years, he taught performance, video, installation, and art history in UCLA’s New Genres Department, where he influenced generations of West Coast artists.

ABOUT andSONS CHOCOLATIERS

A second-generation chocolatier based in Beverly Hills for over 40 years, andSons is recognized as one of America’s premier confectioners. With a world-class culinary team helmed by Chef Sandy Tran, former executive pastry chef of The French Laundry, the kitchen in the Los Angeles Arts District blends classical European technique with bold California creativity. Its bonbons, ranging from timeless to inventive, are made with seasonal, chef-sourced ingredients, including produce from the Santa Monica Farmers Market, fresh dairy from Northern California, and ethically sourced cacao.