The return of Dirty Frank’s annual art show asks: ‘How did the pandemic impact your work?’

Since the 1960′s, when the original owner of Dirty Frank’s let an artist settle a tab with a painting, the iconic Center City dive has been a haven for Philadelphia’s creative class.

By 1978, when an official gallery opened on its beer-splashed walls, Dirty Frank’s had become one of the city’s pioneering alternative art spaces.

And by 2020, the bar had nurtured such a vast community of established and aspiring artists, that even in those troubled times, as the bar shut down and Center City emptied, they never stopped selling art.

A new online art gallery, window shows, and auctions helped artists and bar employees get by. And now, for the first time in three years, Off the Wall Gallery at Dirty Frank’s is again hosting its annual juried summer show.

The question they posed to entrants was a natural one, at a whiskey-scented focal point of the city’s art scene: “How did the pandemic impact your art?”

“Think about all the myriad ways we as individuals responded to the pandemic, and you can easily imagine the countless ways that artists responded,” said Togo Travalia, longtime manager of Off the Wall Gallery. “We wanted to provide a sounding board, a show that allowed our artistic community — and artists we hadn’t met — to reflect.”

Entitled “REEMERGE,” the show accepted 71 pieces from 42 artists, from as far as Kansas and South Carolina. In many cases the pieces couldn’t be more different from each other. But they’re all born from a shared trauma — one that, by design, can engage as many viewers as possible. It’s the bar’s way of inviting their community back to talk through the emotions of an extraordinary three years.

Each artist’s submission views a common touchpoint through an individual lens.

There are vibrant drawings of futuristic cityscapes bursting with color — and buildings alive with feelings and personalities — to represent artist Mason Carter’s longing for community and togetherness.

Jessika Carvajal Garavito’s illustration of a Black Lives Matter protester, rising from a crowd, holding a sign and cradling a child, resembles an anguished Statue of Liberty.

There are stylish and slightly delirious emoji expressions, by Karen Rodewald, mimicking the manic ennui of lockdown. A drawing of a woman glued to her phone, ignoring the walls of peering eyes behind her, from Holly Wynn. A painting of a rubber duckie, floating on swells of a massive ocean, by Emma van den Akker.

Natalie Hope McDonald, a Philadelphia-based writer and illustrator whose work is also showing at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, submitted a sheet of silver Mylar with “The Party’s Not Over” painted across it — like lipstick on a foggy mirror. The work is a nod to Andy Warhol and the 1970s — an era that also sprang from turmoil, she wrote in the show program.

“I like to think that after spending so much time locked down and now facing an uncertain future … that there might be a vital return to decadence,” she wrote, “the stuff of disco and unbridled escapism, whether as a way to heal or just be free.”

The show also includes three video installations, like “Tea Time in Turbulence,” in which interdisciplinary artist Christy E. O’Connor portrays a Marie Antoinette-like donning a gas mask.

In all, the combined power of REEMERGE, which runs through Aug. 5, is found in the “intense and diverse” voices that seem to speak from the wall at once, said Dirty Frank’s co-owner and gallery curator, Jody Sweitzer.

“It’s almost overwhelming,” she said, “all the energy that has been in seclusion so long.”