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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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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