Alex Da Corte: The Street
Jan. 13–March 10, 2023
Artist Lecture: Wednesday, Feb. 1
7 p.m., Levitt Auditorium
Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery at University of the Arts is pleased to present Alex Da Corte’s The Street. This complex installation comprises a suite of Da Corte’s recent large-scale reverse-glass paintings, shown for the first time, hung against a background mural of his own design in an environment including masonry columns, neon and placards.
The Street references Venturi, Scott Brown’s Main Street and the vernacular vocabulary of popular culture culled from the internet, Philadelphia, animation cels, Pop Art in general and the American artist Marjorie Strider in particular, the paintings of Andrew Gbur BFA ’07 (Painting and Drawing), book cover and record design, Disney’s Snow White, James Rosenquist’s F-111, Sesame Street, avant-garde swimwear designer Rudi Gernreich, Marilyn Monroe, Sister Corita Kent, the Mexican version of Ernie Bushmiller’s comic-strip scamp Nancy known as Periquita, Ed Ruscha, R. L. Stine’s Fear Street series of YA horror novels, an obscure wall-mural advertisement in south Jersey, Langston Hughes and Donald Barthelme, Milton Glaser, manuals for making windows, and an early work by UArts professor Edna Andrade. In total, the project deals with the appropriation and mirroring of popular culture, anamorphic distortion, cultural memory and personal reflection. On the street, disorder is an order we cannot see. On the street, everyone is a voyeur.
Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery thanks the Philadelphia Mural Arts Program for its assistance in this exhibition. Da Corte is represented by Matthew Marks Gallery, New York and Los Angeles, and Sadie Coles HQ, London.
All Rosenwald-Wolf Galleries are free and open to the public.
Events
Opening Reception
Friday, Jan. 13, 5-7:30pm
Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery
Anderson Building
333 S. Broad St.
Philadelphia, PA 19102
Join us for the opening reception of The Street.
Artist Lecture
Wednesday, Feb. 1 at 7 p.m.
Levitt Auditorium
Gershman Hall
401 S. Broad St.
Philadelphia, PA 19102
Join Alex Da Corte for a presentation about his current exhibition, The Street. Free and open to the public but registration is required.
Film Screening
Tuesday, Feb. 7 at 7p.m.
Lightbox Film Center
401 S. Broad St.
Philadelphia, PA 19102
Join Alex Da Corte at Lightbox Film Center for an evening of films curated by the artist, including a selection of his own video works.
About the Artist
Born in 1980 in Camden, New Jersey, Da Corte is well known to the University of the Arts and Philadelphia communities. A 2004 alum of the university, Da Corte received his MFA from Yale University in 2010. He was last seen at UArts on March 5, 2020, when he re-envisioned Allan Kaprow’s Chicken in Gershman Hall.
Da Corte’s work has been widely shown nationally and internationally. Institutional exhibition highlights include the Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2022); the Biennale di Venezia, Venice (2019); the 57th Carnegie International, Pittsburgh (2019); the Biennale de Lyon (2015), and solo exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2021); Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne (2018); Secession, Vienna (2016); Art + Practice, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2016); MASS MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts (2016); the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam (2015); and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (2014, together with fellow UArts alum Jayson Musson). Da Corte lives and works in Philadelphia.
Da Corte’s works are in public collections including The Whitney Museum of American Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Glenstone, Potomac, Maryland; the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark; Musée d’Art Contemporain de Lyon, France; Fondazione Prada, Milan, Italy; Aïshti Foundation, Jal El Dib, Lebanon; and the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden. His 20-year survey exhibition, Mr. Remember, runs until January 8, 2023 at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art.
Additionally, Da Corte is currently participating in Entre/Between, a monumental group exhibition about liminality and Latinx identity at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and the Momentary, Bentonville, Arkansas. Da Corte was awarded a Pew Fellowship in the Arts from the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage in 2012, and he was awarded a Silver Star Alumni Award from UArts in 2020. Da Corte is a recipient of the 2022–2023 Rome Prize.