Alex Da Corte's six-year labor of love is about to see the light of day. The Buffalo AKG museum in upstate New York has announced that on December 11 it will premiere "The Party" (2026), a feature-length, stop-motion animated opera by the Venezuelan-American artist that the museum describes as a "treasure-filled" production. The work represents one of the most ambitious undertakings of Da Corte's career, unfolding across a runtime and a production scale unusual for contemporary art. The announcement caps a remarkable autumn for the artist. On October 11, the Whitney Museum of American Art opens a hotly anticipated Roy Lichtenstein retrospective that Da Corte co-organized with Whitney curator Meg Onli — an unexpected pairing of a contemporary practitioner with one of Pop Art's canonical figures. On October 29, he will present the Whitney's Walter Annenberg Lecture, discussing his engagement with Lichtenstein as both artist and curator. Da Corte is best known for his exuberant video art and installations that examine celebrity and consumer culture through a surreal, color-saturated lens. A stop-motion animated opera extends those preoccupations into an entirely new register, combining his theatrical sensibility with one of the most labor-intensive forms of filmmaking. That he spent six years on the production suggests an opus of unusual personal significance. The Buffalo premiere gives the upstate museum a notable coup: the debut of a major new work by an artist at the height of his visibility. For audiences, "The Party" promises to be one of the season's most talked-about events — a feature-length animated opera from an artist better known for gallery installations, arriving just as his curatorial turn at the Whitney puts him at the center of the New York art conversation.