Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery presents Alex Da Corte’s ’The Street’

From Friday, Jan. 13 to Friday, March 10, Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery at University of the Arts will 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. An opening reception will be held at the gallery Friday, Jan. 13 from 5 to 7:30 p.m.

The Street references Venturi, Scott Brown’s Main Street and the Information Highway, Philadelphia, the vernacular vocabulary of popular culture culled from the internet, animation cels, Pop Art in general and the American artist Marjorie Strider in particular, the paintings of Andrew Gbur BFA ’07 (Painting), 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.

All Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery exhibitions are free and open to the public.

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 UArts alum, 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.

learn more about the artist, exhibition and upcoming events