Roy Lichtenstein's 1963 World's Fair Mural Returns, 32 Feet Tall

A 32-foot-tall recreation of Roy Lichtenstein's "New York World's Fair Mural (Girl in Window)" (1963) now stands on the Whitney Museum's terrace, hand-painted by the studio of artist Alex Da Corte.

The work is visible from the High Line, the elevated park that runs alongside the museum's Gansevoort Street home. At that scale, and in that location, the mural functions as public art before visitors ever buy a ticket.

Lichtenstein painted the original in 1963 for the New York World's Fair, where his enlarged comic-book idiom — the ben-day dots, the bold outlines, the single galvanizing gesture — announced Pop art's arrival on an civic stage. "Girl in Window" compresses that vocabulary into a single female figure, rendered at architectural scale.

Who made the recreation?

Alex Da Corte's studio executed the new version by hand. Da Corte, known for his own saturated, pop-inflected installations, brings a practice steeped in the same visual language Lichtenstein helped canonize: mass-media imagery, commercial color, and the slippery line between reproduction and original.

The choice of a hand-painted recreation rather than a digital print matters. Lichtenstein's originals translated mechanical printing into brushwork; Da Corte's studio reverses and repeats that translation, connecting the dots between a 1963 fair mural and contemporary painting's ongoing negotiation with reproduction.

What does the placement change?

The Whitney's terrace positions the mural against the downtown skyline, not a gallery wall. Passersby on the High Line encounter it incidentally, at street-adjacent altitude, much as 1964 fair visitors encountered Lichtenstein's pavilion murals amid the spectacle of Flushing Meadows.

The scale is the argument. At 32 feet, the dot pattern and the girl's face stop reading as comic-strip citation and start reading as architecture — the effect Lichtenstein pursued when he accepted the World's Fair commission.

Why Lichtenstein, why now?

The recreation frames Lichtenstein not as a historical figure but as a live reference for artists working today. Da Corte's involvement makes the lineage explicit: a contemporary painter restaging a Pop landmark by hand, on a museum's exterior, for an audience that includes commuters and tourists as much as ticket-holders.

The Whitney has not announced how long the mural will remain on the terrace; until it comes down, the High Line offers the best vantage point on a 1963 image rebuilt at full ambition in 2024's public realm.