Alex Da Corte’s ‘The Street’ is a love letter to Philadelphia written in Pop Art

Where is Alex Da Corte?

Friday, Jan. 13. It’s opening night of his new show, “The Street,” at the Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery at University of the Arts, and there’s no sign of the Camden-born conceptual artist.

It’s packed. Only an A-lister could draw 100 people to an art gallery. Da Corte has had a solo show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, shown work at the Whitney and Venice biennials, and currently has a 20-year retrospective in Copenhagen.

I’ve been warned that Da Corte may be hard to find tonight, since he often appears in public in disguise or in drag.

Plenty of characters roam these walls. I see men with flowing hair and curly mustaches, leather jackets and gold chains, vintage sweaters and wire-frame glasses. So, which one of you is Alex Da Corte?

To muddle things further, most of the guests turn to face one another, rather than the artwork on the walls. “Nobody looks at paintings anymore,” says painter Sasha Budaev, who chats with two friends. All three have their backs turned to The Last House on the Left, a 33-foot-long, pitch-black painting of lamps, chandeliers, and a ceiling fan.

Tonight’s disguise turns out to be deceptively simple. Darting around the gallery in plain sight, Da Corte is one of the few people wearing a face mask.

When you manage to spot him, the next question can be just as tricky: When is Alex Da Corte?

“The Street,” like his previous work, samples from many decades of high art, pop culture, and personal memory. Da Corte vacuums up visual references from movies, museums, music, and magazines. Disney and Donna Summer matter as much as Raphael and Rubens. Here, derivative is not a bad word, but a guiding spirit. Pick up, cut and paste, toss out, move on.

The show nods to Pop Art from the start. On the wall behind the front desk is a floor-to-ceiling mural of the Wonder Bread logo. A few steps later, we see Marilyn Monroe inside of a black, six-foot-tall frame, an image obviously lifted from Andy Warhol. Warhol had also lifted the image, tracing it from a publicity still and screen-printing it in combinations of bright paint and black ink.

Da Corte made his copy, Mirror Marilyn, with acrylics and wax pastels, and rather than printing it, he painted it directly onto the glass of the frame. This is a technique known as reverse-glass painting; every picture hanging in the show has been done this way. No canvas, no panel, no paper — just paint on plexiglass sheets.

As we take a conceptual walk down “The Street,” we are immersed in Da Corte’s memories, footnotes, and creative tools. Vultures from Snow White. Old-fashioned patterns that feel like grandma’s house. Album covers and paperback mystery book covers. The gallery buzzes because everyone sees something in every piece, even if we all see different things.

Intimacy and autobiography distinguish Da Corte from his Pop Art ancestors; those known for impersonal, detached irony. “I’m attached,” Da Corte says on the phone a few days after the opening. “This is a love letter to Philadelphia, and also to the school that took me in and showed me so much of what I know today.”

Da Corte studied printmaking at University of the Arts in the early 2000s. The show’s curator, Sid Sachs, was his art history professor.

In the 150 years we call Modern Art, the “high” (painting, sculpture) has always borrowed from the “low” (mass culture), dicing it into pieces, gluing it back together, blowing it all up. For Da Corte this process always seems to come with the Scotch tape still visible, his source material never hidden but always the subject. The inspiration for “The Street,” he says, came from Sesame Street, comic strips, book covers, and album art. But also Langston Hughes, some old-school French and German animators, and Philadelphia architects Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

I mention the word nostalgia — because how could you not? — and he pushes back. “I never see it as nostalgia,” he says. “Wherever you go, you are, but you leave a trace behind. These traces never leave us, and we never forget. We are constantly re-understanding and taking on new things in an old way.”

It’s been 60 years since Warhol screen-printed Monroe and a century since Marcel Duchamp turned a urinal upside down. Will contemporary art forever be stuck in this kitschy loop of reference, self-reference, and self-reference-reference?

If you’re lucky enough to track down Da Corte, he reminds you that the past, no matter how cloudy or clichéd, can help you see the present. “I dig where I stand,” he says, describing his connection to UArts, to Philadelphia, to all that came before. “My life is as it is because of what you see in ‘The Street,’ and I am not afraid of it. I’m very thankful for it.”

“The Street” is on display through March 10 at the Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery at 333 S. Broad St. Da Corte will present an artist talk Feb. 1 on the University of the Arts campus. His video work will screen at Lightbox Film Center on Feb. 7. https://www.uarts.edu/gallery/alex-da-corte-street