Deborah Kass (American, b. 1952) is a painter and sculptor who appropriates the work of male modernist and Pop artists to rewrite the patriarchal narrative of art history.,Her work draws on pop culture and addresses feminist, lesbian and Jewish identity.,She lives and works in Brooklyn.
Kass was born in San Antonio, Texas, and earned a BFA in painting from Carnegie Mellon University in 1974.Her first solo exhibition was at the Baskerville and Watson gallery in 1983. In the late 1980s she began The Art History Paintings, which appropriate work by Picasso, Jasper Johns and Jackson Pollock.In Subject Matters, 1989–90, headless Lucy characters from Peanuts sit beside a gilded letter I and Johns's sculpture The Critic Sees.The series was shown at Simon Watson gallery in 1990 and reprised at Salon 94 in 2025, where its complete run, minus one painting, went on view for the first time.,
From 1992 to 2000 Kass used Andy Warhol's visual language in The Warhol Project. She featured Streisand in many of these works and replaced Warhol's celebrity subjects with heroines including Gertrude Stein, Cindy Sherman, Linda Nochlin and Elizabeth Streb.The series underpinned her 2012 mid-career survey “Before and Happily Ever After” at The Andy Warhol Museum.,Her later series feel good paintings for feel bad times refers to contemporary art history, Broadway musicals and the Great American Songbook. Her sculpture OY/YO consists of two canary yellow letters that read as the Yiddish oy or as yo.It was first installed in Brooklyn Bridge Park in 2015 and later at the Brooklyn Museum.,
Kass served as Senior Critic in Painting and Printmaking at the Yale School of Art from 2005 to 2012.Her work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.,
