Opening reception: Friday, January 30, 2026 from 5 – 7 pm

Contemporary critics described the avant-garde art of the 1980s and ’90s as Postmodernist appropriation, Neo-Expressionism, Neo-Geometric Conceptualism, and Post-Graffiti. These movements signaled a decisive break from past expectations and a full-force tilt toward the “new.” Works by Ashley Bickerton, Jeff Koons, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Sherrie Levine, Keith Haring, Francesco Clemente, David Wojnarowicz, Robert Gober, Cindy Sherman, Félix González-Torres, Richard Prince, Louise Lawler, Sturtevant, Haim Steinbach, John Armleder, Meyer Vaisman, Robert Longo, Peter Nagy, George Condo, Peter Schuyff, and Philip Taaffe featured in Collecting the New Irascibles: Art in the 1980s embody these concerns.

A landmark exhibition, Collecting the New Irascibles: Art in the 1980s opens a window onto the Lower East Side art scene, where low rents and studio-ready lofts fostered a dynamic arts ecology fueled by fearless critics and intrepid dealers. Unlike other exhibitions about the era, Collecting the New Irascibles argues that the Lower East Side art scene could not have thrived without the audacious support of collectors whose deep engagement with challenging, often controversial art forged long-standing, generative relationships with the artists they championed.

Collecting the New Irascibles: Art in the 1980s brings together loans from world-renowned collections—including the Neumann, Schwartz, Spiegel-Wilks, and Schorr families, all with multiple Penn alumni in their ranks—as well as acknowledging the transformative contributions of the Rubell family and the legacy of Elaine Dannheisser, whose estate is now held by the Museum of Modern Art, New York. At its center is Timothy Greenfield-Sanders’s stunning 1985 portrait, The New Irascibles: The Collectors, which presciently enshrined these families as the most ambitious and dedicated supporters of the fin de siècle avant-garde American art scene.

This once-in-a-lifetime exhibition focused on the power of collecting to affect the trajectory of art history is curated by Dr. Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, Inaugural Faculty Director of the Arthur Ross Gallery and James and Nan Farquhar Professor of the History of Art at Penn.