Jen Stark's Psychedelic Art Lights Up the Sphere in Las Vegas

Miami-born Jen Stark is a seasoned artist, but she's never worked on a canvas this large. Her latest work, titled Cosmic Cascade, is a dripping technicolor explosion oozing over the Exosphere, the exterior of Las Vegas' groundbreaking music venue, the Sphere.

The piece, on display about twice each hour throughout March, is part of the Sphere's XO/Art Program, which showcases artwork from artists around the world.

Stark says the venue first approached her about displaying her work last year, and after some months of discussion, they settled on a March 2025 launch date. But the unconventional commission presented some unique design challenges.

"This is a huge canvas," she tells New Times. "It has one billion colors. It's the largest LED screen in the world, so we had to build this animation by hand all over again. It had to be seamless…We had to put special effects on it to make it fit the actual Sphere."

"It was quite a technical feat," she says. Executing the massive installation took "a couple of months of really intense, hard work — 12-hour days just figuring it out and putting the work in." Stark collaborated with animators David Lewandowski and Eric Epstein, whom she calls "amazing artists and technologists."
Stark finally got to see the fruits of her labor when she visited Las Vegas this past weekend.

"It was absolutely incredible," she says of seeing Cosmic Cascade on display for the first time. "I was walking on the sidewalk and just saw it appear. I screamed. I danced around. It was amazing. I've never seen my work so large, and the colors are so intense and beautiful. It's probably one of the best moments of my life."

Displaying on the exterior of a state-of-the-art venue in one of the world's most visited cities would be a career highlight for any artist, but it's even more notable when you consider Stark's career milestones have included exhibiting at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., and a memorable collaboration with Miley Cyrus and MTV for the 2015 Video Music Awards. The common thread running through all of these pieces is her signature psychedelic color palette, which stands out even in a city as visually overstimulating as Vegas.

"It's color theory, rainbows," she says. "People get really excited about the patterns and the colors, so I hope they walk away with a little bit of excitement and inspiration."