Celebrating a new exhibition of paintings by Penn alumna and contemporary artist Allison Zuckerman

April 21, 2026

Now on view at Penn Live Arts, Allison Zuckerman: Remixed and Reclaimed is curated by Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw of the Arthur Ross Gallery.

More than 100 people attended the April 12 opening celebration of the exhibition, including faculty, students, collectors, gallerists, and other artists. Allison Zuckerman: Remixed and Reclaimed will be on view at Penn’s Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts through March 18, 2027.

The exhibition curator is Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, the Inaugural Faculty Director of the Arthur Ross Gallery. “This is really dazzling,” Shaw said to those gathered in front of the paintings. “It’s so great to be able to have Allison’s work on campus.”

Zuckerman earned her bachelor’s degree in fine arts from Penn in 2012. Shaw, the James and Nan Wagner Farquhar Professor of History of Art at Penn, was one of her professors. Zuckerman earned her Master of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2015.

“It’s always great to see what your students go on to do,” Shaw said, turning to Zuckerman. “And I have to say that there are very few who have impressed me as much as you, so it’s a pleasure to continue to be able to work with you.”

In her remarks Zuckerman said that life as an artist making work in a studio “can be a little isolating,” so to see her paintings on the walls at the Annenberg Center “doing what I’ve always envisioned them to do is extremely gratifying.”

She also spoke about her studies at Penn. “So much of my work is about art history,” she said. “I took my first art history course with Gwendolyn, and she introduced me into a universe that I didn’t even know existed, that really created the foundation for these paintings.” Some of the elements in the paintings echo works she made while she was a Penn student.

“I think in life it’s rare to feel like something has come full circle and I feel that now,” she said in an interview. “It’s so special. I’ll show at a gallery, I’ll show at different venues, and they all have a lot of meaning, but this is like home. I learned so much at Penn.”

Zuckerman and Shaw thanked Hubert Neumann, a 1952 graduate of the Wharton School, and his daughter, Melissa Neumann, for lending five of the paintings.

“I think it’s completely astounding,” Melissa Neumann said about the exhibition. She took note of the lighting over the landing and the installation’s extra height. “Even knowing these works intimately, they look very different in the space,” she said. “And that’s what makes a great painting, is that you see different things as they travel outside of your home or outside the gallery.”

Neumann noted “the dialogue between the works” in the exhibition. “Being able to view it from this perspective brings out so many elements that I had never experienced before visually,” Neumann said. “And having them all together from different periods of Allison’s career, there’s just a synergy about and an intensity for the work because they’re recontextualized from different periods of her evolution that create like a symphony.”

The selected paintings span 2017 to 2025. “It’s rare to have paintings from different times together. They go out into the world, and then maybe you see them again, but you don’t see them
grouped with paintings from three years later or four years earlier,” Zuckerman said. “I’m learning from looking at them.”

Susie Kravets and Mark Wehby of the Kravets Wehby Gallery in New York City represent Zuckerman. “It’s so exciting just to see the work from the different periods of her career and how well they work together and yet how different they are from each other. You can get a sense that she was in a very different place in her life in each one,” Kravets said. “To me, that’s an amazing accomplishment for an artist, for it to come through so clearly. And it’s all her. You can tell that it’s Allison Zuckerman.”

Relying on digital research, Zuckerman begins by collecting and altering reproductions of historical artworks, primarily by male artists, remixing fragments of Old Master paintings with gestures from modernism, animation, and the internet. She translates these manipulated sources into thickly worked surfaces in oil and acrylic, creating densely constructed and layered compositions.

“The resulting paintings blur boundaries between past and present, original and copy, digital and handmade,” Shaw said. “Her hybrid, often female figures—assembled from borrowed faces, bodies, and decorative elements—occupy compressed, saturated spaces that seem to press toward the viewer.”

Zuckerman has held solo exhibitions at several museums in the United States and abroad. In addition to her studio practice, she has collaborated with cultural and fashion institutions creating projects that bridge contemporary art, media, and visual culture.

One of Melissa Neumann’s favorites in the Penn exhibition is “Everyone’s a Winner” — an acrylic, oil, and archival ink on canvas, with rhinestones — that was in the center stairwell of her New York City home. “I fell in love with it the second I saw it,” Neumann said about the portrait. “To me, this is the most radical of the works of the show.”

Neumann pointed out the clear references to Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse along with digital elements like glittery confetti-like squares floating throughout. “It’s a whole new type of portraiture that she’s done in this painting,” she said. “There’s a flatness, but there’s also a depth
that she gets with these new visual elements.”

Allison Zuckerman: Remixed and Reclaimed is a presentation of the Arthur Ross Gallery, Penn Live Arts, and The Sachs Program for Arts Innovation.
Photography by Constance Mensh.