On view at the Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts

This exhibition curated by the Arthur Ross Gallery presents a selection of recent paintings by Penn alum Allison Zuckerman, C’12, that exemplify her exuberant, layered approach to image-making.

Using paint and collage, Allison Zuckerman creates densely constructed compositions that draw from art history, popular culture, and the internet. She remixes fragments of Old Master paintings with gestures borrowed from modernism and animation to produce maximalist images. Her hybrid, often female figures—assembled from borrowed faces, bodies, and decorative elements—occupy compressed, saturated spaces that seem to press toward the viewer.

A digital native, Zuckerman begins by collecting and altering reproductions of historical artworks, primarily by male artists. She then translates these manipulated sources into thickly worked surfaces in oil and acrylic. The resulting paintings blur boundaries between past and present, original and copy, digital and handmade. Art historical references function as visual “Easter eggs,” rewarding sustained, close looking.

At the core of her practice is a critical engagement with the Western canon, which she studied as a Fine Arts major at the University of Pennsylvania, Class of 2012. She earned her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2015. By cutting up and reconfiguring canonical works, she challenges longstanding hierarchies and asserts her own authorial agency. Zuckerman’s paintings celebrate the history of the medium while reimagining who has the power to shape its future.

The exhibition curator is Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, the Inaugural Faculty Director of the Arthur Ross Gallery and the James and Nan Wagner Farquhar Professor of History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania. On view in the grand lobby of the Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, Allison Zuckerman: Remixed and Reclaimed is a presentation of the Arthur Ross Gallery, Penn Live Arts, and The Sachs Program for Arts Innovation.