Deborah Kass

Deborah Kass has developed a distinctive artistic practice spanning a broad range of styles and media. Her work explores the intersection of pop culture and identity, with a particular focus on challenging and recontextualizing dominant narratives in art history. By engaging with the visual language of art history, Kass creates space for new dialogues that interrogate constructs of power, gender, and cultural representation.

Kass first gained notoriety in the 1990s when she exhibited The Art History Paintings at Simon Watson Gallery, New York. These works offer a critical perspective on both the art historical cannon and contemporary cultural identity of the late-1980s and early-1990s. Laura Cottingham, an American art critic, wrote in 1990 that “Kass challenges painting to reconsider some of its most conservative postures. Her visual appropriations of modern masters, for instance, reveal some of the sub-texts beneath America[n]’s painting’s supposed triumph.” Most recently, Kass has sought to engage a wider audience through public art installations and print campaigns, moving beyond traditional gallery spaces to situate her work within the urban landscape, including her monumental OY/YO sculptures permanently installed in front of three major museums: The Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, Stanford, CA; and The Weitzman Museum of American Jewish Culture, Philadelphia, PA. These recent works speak to our contemporary, twenty-first century, socio-political climate through her characteristic integration of pop culture, aesthetics, and political commentary.

Kass’s work has been widely exhibited nationally and internationally. Her major mid-career retrospective Deborah Kass: Before and Happily Ever After was held at the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, in 2012. Her work has recently been featured in several significant group exhibitions, including The New American Wing, Brooklyn Wing, Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, NY; Gertrude Stein / Pablo Picasso: The Invention of Language, Musée du Luxembourg, Paris, France, 2023; Tender Loving Care: Contemporary Art from the Collection, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Boston, MA, 2023-2025; and He Said/She Said: Contemporary Female Artists Interject, Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX, 2023.

Her works are represented in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Jewish Museum, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; the Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Cambridge, MA; the New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, LA; the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC; the Pérez Art Museum, Miami, FL; and the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX, among others.

Born in San Antonio, Texas, in 1952, Kass earned her BFA in Painting from Carnegie Mellon University and studied at both the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program and the Art Students League in New York. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.