Allison Zuckerman, Conferring with Grace, 2021. Acrylic, oil, rhinestones, and archival ink on canvas. Courtesy of the Neumann Family Collection.
The Sachs Program for Arts Innovation, Arthur Ross Gallery, and Penn Live Arts present Allison Zuckerman: Remixed and Reclaimed, an exhibition of recent paintings by University of Pennsylvania alum Allison Zuckerman, C’12, on view at the Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, beginning March 28, 2026, through March 18, 2027.
The exhibition features Zuckerman’s vivid, layered compositions, which draw from art history, popular culture, and found imagery to create bold new visual worlds. Through collage-like paintings and dynamic reworkings of familiar forms, Zuckerman reclaims and reimagines representation with energy, wit, and intensity.
Allison Zuckerman: Remixed and Reclaimed is organized by the Arthur Ross Gallery. 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.
Opening Reception
Please join us on Sunday, April 12, to celebrate the exhibition opening with a public reception at the Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, beginning at 2:00 pm.
Registration is requested but is not required to attend.
- Sunday, April 12, 2026
2:00–4:00 PM - Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts
3680 Walnut Street
University of Pennsylvania
This program is free and open to the public.
About the Artist
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 Art historical references function as visual “Easter eggs,” rewarding sustained, close looking.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.
Acknowledgments
The presentation of Allison Zuckerman: Remixed and Reclaimed at the Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts is a collaboration between the Arthur Ross Gallery, Penn Live Arts, and The Sachs Program for Arts Innovation.
