Today the Buffalo AKG announced Alex Da Corte: The Party, a major new video installation by celebrated conceptual artist Alex Da Corte (American, born 1980). The exhibition, which opens on Friday, December 11, 2026, will be the world premiere of The Party, a feature-length, stop-motion animated opera. The work has been in development for six years and stands among the most ambitious projects of Da Corte’s career. It will remain on view at the Buffalo AKG through May 3, 2027. The exhibition is co-organized with the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where it will travel following its debut in Buffalo. Alex Da Corte: The Party is curated by Cathleen Chaffee, Charles Balbach Chief Curator of the Buffalo AKG. In November, Chaffee will begin her tenure as the museum’s Artistic Director, one of its two Directors.

The exhibition will open with an evening at the AKG at which the artist will narrate the opera for attendees with one of its stars performing several arias live in the museum’s Lipsey Auditorium. The event is open exclusively to Members of the Buffalo AKG starting at the Dual Plus level and above. In February of 2027, the Philadelphia Orchestra will stage the opera in full, with a live performance synchronized to the film projection.

"The Party is an extraordinarily ambitious work, a wholly unique meditation on family, memory, power, and identity,” said Chaffee. “This is also a project with a profound connection to the Buffalo AKG: it grew out of Da Corte's sustained engagement with Marisol (Venezuelan and American, born France, 1930-2016), an artist whose work and legacy are an essential part of this museum. I can’t imagine a more meaningful place for The Party to have its world premiere.”

No conceptual artist in the 21st century has excavated Modernism with as much innovation as Alex Da Corte. He transforms the visual language of American popular culture into often uncanny and always psychologically complex meditations on identity and mortality. His immersive installations, paintings, sculptures, and videos layer references from Disney cartoons, television programs, commercial branding, and art history.

“For the past six years, we have made The Party. It is the single biggest undertaking of my creative life,” said Da Corte. “It has been a constant presence. We made it by hand in a dark room, for countless unbroken months at a time, during a time of dystopic darkness. It is a story about a group of women, united in spirit while laden by the loneliness of unshareable individual circumstances, negotiating life and options in a world defined by darkness. I am proud and grateful to shepherd it into the light.”

Throughout his oeuvre, Da Corte has sustained engagement with the work of the Pop artist Marisol, who bequeathed her estate to the Buffalo AKG upon her death in 2016. In 2023, Da Corte contributed an essay to the catalogue for Marisol: A Retrospective, the Buffalo AKG’s retrospective exhibition of Marisol’s work that toured internationally for more than three years. In The Party, which has been in development since 2020, Da Corte reimagines each of the characters in Marisol’s iconic 1965-66 multi-figure installation The Party as nominative surrogates for his Venezuelan aunts and other family members. Da Corte painstakingly reconstructed the sculptures at one-third scale, often going to great lengths to procure the specific materials Marisol used in her original works. He also created numerous casts of his own face for each sculpture that depict different expressions depending on the action in the opera.

The opera unfolds in a grand countryside manor where twelve women gather at sunset to mark the conclusion of El Milagro del Sol (“The Miracle of the Sun”), the single day each year when light briefly returns to their otherwise dark world. In Da Corte’s words, the opera is “set at a time when the sun only shines for one day a year, and the players at the party are all wondering how to move forward while holding on to their pasts.” In three acts filled with heartbreaking beauty as well as suspicion, fear, exposed intimacy, and resentment, the relationships between women fracture, and violence erupts. The Party asks what it might mean to live fully yet remain dispersed, without the promise of integration. It considers what can be preserved from dreams circumscribed by circumstance, and what becomes of hope that never sees the light of day.

The video opera, which will be presented in the AKG’s Hemicycle Gallery, is primarily sung in Spanish with a cast composed entirely of Latin American opera singers. Da Corte worked in close collaboration with composer Austin Fisher to develop a score that draws on the formal intensity of Giacomo Puccini, Giuseppe Verdi, and Gaetano Donizetti. It also engages the work of Daniel Catán, particularly his role in expanding Spanish-language opera within contemporary practice. Additional referents include the stylized theatricality of Klaus Nomi, cinematic orchestration, and musical popularization and even devolution, from lounge piano to operatic tropes most familiar from Looney Toons.  

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Alex Da Corte: The Party is presented with generous support from Aleron.

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About Alex Da Corte

Alex Da Corte (b. 1980, Camden, NJ) is a Venezuelan-American artist. Institutional exhibition highlights include the survey exhibitions The Whale at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (2025), Fresh Hell at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan (2023), and Mr. Remember at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark (2022–23); the Whitney Biennial Quiet as It’s Kept (2022); the Roof Garden Commission for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2021); the Biennale di Venezia May You Live in Interesting Times, Venice (2019); the 57th Carnegie International, Pittsburgh (2019); and solo exhibitions at Glenstone, Potomac (2025); the Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne (2018); Secession, Vienna (2016); Art + Practice, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2016); MASS MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts (2016); Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam (2015); and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (2014, together with Jayson Musson). Recent longform critical writing include catalogue essays for the international touring exhibitions Marisol: A Retrospective and Ellsworth Kelly at 100. In 2026, with the Whitney Museum’s Meg Onli, Da Corte will co-curate the first Roy Lichtenstein retrospective in New York in more than 30 years. Da Corte was the 2023 Philip Guston Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome. Da Corte lives and works in Philadelphia.

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About the Buffalo AKG Art Museum

Founded in 1862, the Buffalo AKG Art Museum is the sixth-oldest public art institution in the United States. For more than 160 years, the Buffalo AKG has collected, conserved, and exhibited the art of its time, often working directly with living artists. This tradition has given rise to one of the world’s most extraordinary collections of modern and contemporary art.

In June 2023, following the completion of the most significant campus development and expansion project in its history, the Buffalo AKG opened anew to the public. The project was funded by a $230 million capital campaign, the largest such campaign for a cultural institution in the history of Western New York, including $195 million raised for construction and $35 million in additional operating endowment funds.

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