I, you, we: three very commonplace words. These pronouns—with all their implied complexities of meaning—provide an unexpected guide for assessing the works of art from the 1980s and early 1990s in the Museum’s collection. What becomes apparent in this survey of paintings, sculpture, drawings, prints, and photographs is how the personal, social, and collective issues and concerns of the artists of this time are still relevant several decades later.

I, YOU, WE is organized by David Kiehl, Curator, Prints.

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It’s been a banner year for painter Ms. Kass. She published her first monograph, was honored with a mid-career retrospective at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, and is currently the subject of a solo show at Paul Kasmin Gallery (on view through February 23). Perhaps the most accomplished female painter to emerge since the 1970s, Ms. Kass is a pioneer who consistently pushes the pop art envelope.

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It sounds like a subplot of a bad movie satirizing the high-art world: a feminist Jewish lesbian creates imitations of Warhol’s “Elvis” paintings, substituting the image of Barbra Streisand in the guise of a young male Talmudic scholar from the movie “Yentl.” In reality, at Paul Kasmin the installation of the series, which Deborah Kass initiated in the early 1990s, makes for an exceptionally elegant, thought-provoking show.

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Paul Kasmin Gallery is pleased to present My Elvis +, an exhibition of paintings by Deborah Kass from her historic series, “My Elvis” created in the early 1990’s. Gathered for the first time in the artist’s career and presented to a new generation of viewers. Also on view “+” her first and last self-portraits from her historic “Warhol Project”: “Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man” 1994, “Altered Image #2” and “Red Deb” 2000. My Elvis + will be exhibited at the Gallery’s 515 West 27th Street location January 24 – February 23rd, 2013.

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Paul Kasmin Gallery is pleased to announce that Deborah Kass will have a mid-career retrospective at The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Opening in February of 2012, the exhibition will be curated by Eric Shiner and will include about 75 works ranging from her drawings, paintings and sculpture.

Eric Shiner in this months Art in America writing about his recent visit with Deborah Kass:

On Sunday I flew to New York to meet with artist Deborah Kass, so that we could make the final selection of works to be included in her mid-career retrospective that will launch at the Warhol next spring. The show will include a full range of Kass's paintings, including works from the series "Art History," in which she combines art historical imagery with stills from Disney cartoons, and "The Warhol Project," in which she extended the earlier artist's formal vocabulary to icons who didn't get the Warhol treatment. It will also present drawings, source materials and ephemera. While digging through a box of Polaroids used for "The Warhol Project," we found some incredible images of Cindy Sherman vamping as Liza Minnelli.

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Deborah Kass In Conversation With Robert Storr
THE new york public library, new york ny
stephen a schwarzman building
margaret liebman berger forum, room 227, 2nd fl
january 16th, 2012

Leading curator and critic Robert Storr joins influential artist Deborah Kass for a wide ranging informal conversation on the occasion of the publication of her first monograph Deborah Kass: Before and Happily Ever After (Skira Rizzoli 2012) in conjunction with her mid-career retrospective exhibition at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Two art world veterans get together to discuss art, life, politics and music. Expect the unexpected.

In the late 1980s and early 90s Deborah Kass startled the art world with paintings that began to alter the narrative of contemporary art history. Using the work of painters that came before her—Johns, Pollock, Stella, Warhol—art history became the medium with which Kass questioned and ultimately rewrote the story of postwar art that was considered, more or less, written. Her infamous Art History Paintings, instantly controversial, came after a successful decade of showing landscapes and abstract paintings in New York, and were followed by the groundbreaking Warhol Project works that looked a lot like Warhol’s but with a difference. In place of Liz, Marilyn, or Jackie there was Barbra Streisand instead. The Warhol Project problematized our then codified ideas related to gender and ethnicity, helping stoke the still nascent discussions around identity. Simultaneously marginalized by the art world and embraced by collectors, critics, and art historians, Kass has fearlessly staked out a singular place in contemporary art history.

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Deborah Kass: Before and Happily Ever After
ERIC SHINER, WITH ESSAYS BY BROOK ADAMS AND LISA LIEBMANN, GRISELDA POLLACK, IRVING SANDLER, ROBERT STORR, JOHN Waters
SKIRA RIZZOLI, NEW YORK, NOVEMBER 2012

The first comprehensive book accompanying a major touring exhibition by the painter Deborah Kass. More than any artist of the last thirty years, New York City–based painter Deborah Kass has made it her life’s work to position women artists on the great paternal playing field of art history. From her early paintings of the sea pounding rocky shores to her eponymous Warhol Project series and her recent text-based works, Kass has quite literally fired the canon, challenged the status quo, and refigured art history. The book features in-depth essays by a panoply of important figures, including Robert Storr, renowned curator, professor, and onetime subject of a Kass painting, and Griselda Pollock, one of the most important feminist art historians in the field. The volume can be seen as both a primer on feminist movements of the past thirty years and as a potent wake-up call to the establishment that artists of Kass’s caliber must be at the forefront of today’s art world.

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New York “IT’S ALWAYS BEEN my impulse to use art history as almost a ready-made,” Deborah Kass told the filmmaker John Waters in 2007.1 In her big, pop-infused paintings, however, Kass is no cool-headed Duchampian, and her borrowings are anything but polite. Coming of age in the era of the Pictures Generation, and pursuing its lessons throughout her three-decade career, Kass has pilfered details of well-known 20th-century paintings and snatched the glamour of Warhol’s stars for her own Jewish, lesbian and feminist idols (and herself ). In colorful found-text paintings, she broadcasts uncool Broadway musical lyrics as well as quotations critical of male dominance in the art world. Yet at the same time, Kass pays affectionate homage to all her sources, whether art historical or musical, and to an art-world society with which she maintains a close bond, even as she castigates it for sins and omissions. Artists, collectors and historians appear often in “The Warhol Project” (1992-2000), which includes her best-known works. Within that series, her 1998 screenprint paintings “America’s Most Wanted” present eminent (and sometimes ominous-looking) curators and critics in faux mug shots, as if they were criminals of vast notoriety rather than members of a rarefied elite.

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Riffing on Forefathers and Mothers
THE NEW YORK TIMES
October 28 2012

“COMING out as a Barbra Streisand fan was way more embarrassing than coming out as a lesbian,” the painter Deborah Kass said on a recent morning in her Brooklyn studio. “To be an artist of my generation willing to be unhip — artists were supposed to be like cowboys.” But in 1992 Ms. Kass, then 40, had the idea to borrow the format of Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe and Jacqueline Kennedy silk-screens and swap in an image of Streisand that prominently displays her distinctive profile. Titled “Jewish Jackie,” the series is a loving and poignant homage to both Warhol — a sickly child from an immigrant family and a gay man who became one of the most famous artists of the 20th century — and Ms. Streisand, the multitalented performer and director who never changed her nose or name.

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Deborah Kass at the Warhol Museum:
Seeing Through the Mirror of Her Times
THE HUFFINGTON POST
november 16 2012

It has been my good fortune to experience the Deborah Kass Effect. I mean that at Kass's present retrospective, Before and Happily Ever After, at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, I felt myself liberated from the constraints of time, space and identity. For those who haven't experienced the Deborah Kass effect, suffice that I compare it to the Virginia Woolf Effect--the phasing in and out of time streams and locales, masculine and feminine identities. The difference is that, the Kass Effect isn't achieved in reading a story, but in viewing a painting. If the comparison seems eccentric, consider that Kass is invested in making visual art a process akin to the literary and theatrical experience of entering into the minds and bodies of her subjects with the same disregard for physical boundaries that is the facility afforded writers of fictions and histories. Except, of course, that her language is as much the iconography and signage of pictures and paint as it is the written word. Or really, and quite literally, the painted word.

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Leaving Polarization at the Door
new york times
september 27 2012

In the show “We the People,” from left, a figure by Robert Heinecken and work by May Stevens (behind), Hannah Wilke, David Wojnarowicz, Larry Clark (on floor), Deborah Kass and Shirin Neshat.

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Paul Kasmin Plans Deborah Kass "Yentl" Show
galleristny
september 13 2012

Early next year Paul Kasmin gallery will present a show of works by Deborah Kass that centers around her “Yentl” series, Warhol-inspired pieces that feature Barbra Streisand in her role from that film. The works were mostly made some 10 years ago, and Mr. Kasmin intends to show about 10 to 15 of them. 

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Deborah Kass, Red Deb on cover of ARTnews
ARTNEWS
september 2012 issue

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Andy Warhol and Reality TV
Panel Discussion at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
THE metropolitan museum of art, new york, ny
October 2nd, 2012, 6pm

Andy Warhol once said, "I'm really jealous of everybody who's got their own show on television. I want a show of my own." Warhol eventually starred in several series, culminating in Andy Warhol's Fifteen Minutes. A quarter of a century later, Warhol's idea that "Cable TV is the ultimate America" has come true; reality television and the celebrities it has created have become dominant forces in popular culture. Andy Cohen, Vincent Fremont, and Deborah Kass discuss this unexplored aspect of Warhol's legacy.

Tickets available at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

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Deborah Kass and Robert Storr - An Artist Dialogue Series Event
new york public library, new york ny
stephen a. schwartzman building, margaret liebman berger forum
January 16th 2012, 6-8pm

Leading curator and critic Robert Storr joins influential artist Deborah Kass for a wide ranging informal conversation on the occasion of the publication of her first monograph Deborah Kass: Before and Happily Ever After (Skira Rizzoli 2012) in conjunction with her mid-career retrospective exhibition at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Two art world veterans get together to discuss art, life, politics and music. Expect the unexpected.

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For decades, commentators have observed that Andy Warhol's influence is dominant in contemporary art. This exhibition will be an in-depth examination of the nature and extent of the Warhol sensibility organized around themes, each of which will be delineated by several of Warhol's works, along with objects by other artists who have worked in his wake. The aim is not only to show direct influence, but also to indicate how an artist may have developed Warhol's example into new areas and accomplishments. Accompanied by a catalogue.

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Did Men Invent Art to Become Women? Must Women Become Men to Make Great Art?
huffington post
january 20 2012

There is conjecture that men created art to become women. If this seems absurd, consider the following scenario.

Imagine you are a man living amid the Paleolithic millennia, a time before men had conceived of paternity. Only women are ostensively seen bringing life into the world. Only women are exalted as progenitors bearing the life-giving principle and power. Men who have no ostensive role in regeneration are beneath women and are valued for their strength as hunters and laborers. But you happen to be an exceedingly ambitious man who wants to elevate your position. What would you be willing to do? Would you in mimicry of women's power fashion a form from the earth that resembled a human contour? Certainly that would bring you some celebration if you showed skill at its fashioning. Would you fashion a female form to show that you favor the female over the male? That would bring you favor from powerful women and deities. Would you do both these things while taking to dress as a woman? And if you were seeking great rewards from beyond the mortal realm, would you mutilate yourself, or submit to an order of mutilation, to become as much a woman as would be possible to you?

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The Deconstructive Impulse:
Women Artists Reconfigure the Signs of Power, 1973-1991
contemporary arts museum houston, houston, tx
january 12 2012 - april 15 2012

The Contemporary Arts Museum Houston is pleased to present The Deconstructive Impulse: Women Artists Reconfigure the Signs of Power, 1973-1991, a survey of leading women artists that examines the crucial feminist contribution to the development of deconstructivism in the 1970s and '80s. As the term suggests, deconstructivism involved taking apart and examining source material, generally borrowed from the mass media, to expose the ways commercial images reveal the mechanisms of power. Women had a particularly high stake in this kind of examination and were disproportionately represented among artists who practiced it.

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HIDE/SEEK: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture
brooklyn museum, brooklyn, ny
november 18 2011 - february 12 2012

The first major museum exhibition to focus on themes of gender and sexuality in modern American portraiture, HIDE/SEEK: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture brings together more than one hundred works in a wide range of media, including paintings, photographs, works on paper, film, and installation art. The exhibition charts the underdocumented role that sexual identity has played in the making of modern art, and highlights the contributions of gay and lesbian artists to American art. Beginning in the late nineteenth century with Thomas Eakins’ Realist paintings, HIDE/SEEK traces the often coded narrative of sexual desire in art produced throughout the early modern period and up to the present. The exhibition features pieces by canonical figures in American art—including George Bellows, Marsden Hartley, Alice Neel, and Berenice Abbott—along with works that openly assert gay and lesbian subjects in modern and contemporary art, by artists such as Jess Collins and Tee Corinne.

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Hollywood—there are not many places that have risen to such heights of fame in the twentieth century and few that arouse such fantastic expectations. It all started with a group of young economic refugees from Central and Eastern Europe. They included Adolph Zukor (Paramount), William Fox, Louis B. Mayer (MGM), and the Warner Brothers. In the late nineteenth century they arrived in the port of New York on overcrowded immigrant ships, and two decades later they “invented” Hollywood: the studio system, the stars, the happy ending. How did this cultural revolution come about? How did they manage to reinvent not only an entire industry but also the American myth?

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Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories
national portrait gallery, WASHINGTON DC
october 14 2011 - january 22 2012

Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories features more than 50 artifacts and 100 works by artists from across Europe and the U.S., detailing Stein’s life and work as an artist, collector and distinctive style-maker.

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Art 2
the flag art foundation, new york, ny
september 23 - december 17 2011

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Pittsburgh Biennial
the andy warhol museum, pittsburgh pa
september 17 2011 - january 8 2012

Once home to such cultural luminaries as Mary Cassatt, Willa Cather, Martha Graham, and Gertrude Stein, today’s Pittsburgh continues to produce and/or play home to some of the most talented women artists in this nation. For the Pittsburgh Biennial 2011, The Warhol will assemble an exhibition dedicated to these great artists whose work aims at transgressing boundaries and engendering transformative change in an apparent nod to Stein and her important life’s work. Artists included in the show either currently live or work in Pittsburgh, or once spent a period of many years here. Works included will span all media and will aim to challenge and provoke the status quo.

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American Chambers : Post 90s American Art
gyungnam art museum, korea
september 9 - NOVEMber 27 2011

Enough Already! It’s Deborah Kass’s Turn to Take the Stage
TDR: THE DRAMA REVIEW
Volume 55, Number 3, Fall 2011 (T211)

Contemporary painter Deborah Kass appropriates the forms of post-war masters such as Andy Warhol, Jackson Pollock, and Frank Stella in her work, but her subject choices are often conscious manifestations of her nostalgic identifications with middlebrow Jewish artists and Broadway musicals. Her radical take on nostalgia draws from lyrics, idiomatic sayings, and iconic Jewish figures to promote a progressive rather than conservative agenda. Kass’s performative interventions insert her feminist-Jewish-lesbian self squarely at the center of visual culture’s frame and on the stage of art’s history.

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OY/YO
ASPEN DAILY NEWS
AUGUST 5, 2011

A group of potential art buyers pose for a picture in front of an art piece titled “OY/YO” by Deborah Kass. The piece was one of many available for bid at the artCRUSH 2011 on Friday.

A Metal Gate Makeover
NYTIMES
MAY 2, 2011

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Women Artists Sweep Best of 2010 NYC Arts
HUFFINGTON POST
DECEMBER 8, 2010

Reprising the moods and painterly modus operandi she established for her 2007 Feel Good exhibition, Deborah Kass again banners lyrics across abstract iconography recalling the art of Andy Warhol, Ellsworth Kelly, Frank Stella, and Bruce Nauman. But what on the surface impresses the viewer as regurgitations of Pop Art, on closer inspection reveals itself to be a self-portait of a woman artist courageously confessing her life-long envy of, and ambition to become as talented and great as the men of modern art history. Yet, whereas Kass's first show was marked by a vulnerability and self-deprecation resoundly out of sync with an artworld preferring strident dissidence and critique, this time the lyrics of Stephen Sondheim ("Being Alive") and Laura Nyro ("Save the Country") sound a triumphal and clarion fanfare not unlike the finale of a Broadway musical in which the long-struggling heroine at last sublimates all her pain and anguish by making her mark on the world.

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