Enough Already! It’s Deborah Kass’s Turn to Take the Stage

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.