Deborah Kass

🎓 Words to live by from last year’s special guest speaker and Honorary Doctorate recipient @debkass . Join us for the School of Art Diploma Ceremony, today at 4:30pm in the Philip Chosky Theater at the Purnell Center as the Class of 2026 walks the stage to complete their journeys at CMU. #CMUGrad #CMUSchoolOfArt #TartanProud

YO! Happy birthday to our dear painter and provocateur, deeply intelligent and sharply witty woman and masterful artist to boot— Deb Kass! Our lives (and art history itself!) have been made all the richer for Deb’s presence in them. She came up at a moment when women and queer artists were largely ignored or jilted; celebratory and combative, her canvases lay it all bare— Jewish identity, queer identity, feminism, and the unspoken bylaws of art itself. Unafraid to reference (or not reference), she proves humor is a powerful tool of critique. From the bottom of our hearts, happy birthday! @debkass Pictured: Deb herself — archival studio image — Installation view: “Deb Kass: Art History Paintings,” Salon 94, 2025 — Before and Happily Ever After, (oil and acrylic on canvas, 1991) and corresponding archival coverage. #DebKass #DeborahKass #Salon94

Jewish Museum in Frankfurt! Thank you #MikeD and Juedisches Museum Frankfurt #jmfrankfurt @jmfrankfurt

As we close out Women’s History Month, we thank all the women artists for their labors in creating such amazing and empowering art in The Art of Saving Democracy! VOTE Black Beauty @bmciverart Protect Your Rights @tracieching Let Equality Bloom @brookefischerart - commissioned by Amplifier.org VOTE Faith in the Future #AnnHamilton Save Democracy @debbiemillman My Choice @vcassinova We Are American @celestialterrestrial - commissioned by Amplifier.org Remember to Dream @carriemaeweems Stronger Together @beautifulhoodcrumb - commissioned by Amplifier.org Enough Already @debkass #artofsavingdemocracy #womeninart #artasresistance #womenshistorymonth feministart

The indomitable. Fierce, unsinkable. A hero. An inspiration. Thank you Pat. I already miss you. Pat Steir 1997 #PatSteir

Happy Birthday to the GOAT. Thank you for everything. #stephensondheim #sondheim

Artist Spotlight: Deborah Kass Deborah Kass has spent her career rewriting the script of art history. Known for her bold feminist lens and sharp cultural critique, Kass engages directly with the visual language of power — most famously by appropriating and reimagining the work of artists like Andy Warhol. By inserting women — and herself — into imagery historically dominated by patriarchal figures, she challenges who gets centered, celebrated, and canonized. As Kass puts it: “Shifting these narratives about who counts, and who belongs, and who represents, and who speaks—all of this comes down to claiming equal power.” Her art doesn’t just question representation. It demands it. Image credits: •Portrait by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders •Altered Image #1 by Deborah Kass, 1994 •OY/YO sculpture by Deborah Kass, photo by Etienne Frossard •Enough Already by Deborah Kass #ArtistSpotlight #ArtAsResistance #FeministArt #RepresentationMatters

Deb Kass rug edition installed this month Nobody Puts Baby in The Corner, 2018, hand-knotted New Zealand Wool, 150 knots per inch, 96 x 96 inches, edition 24 + 2APs - This rug is available in custom sizes Deborah Kass’s rug is basically pop art with a wicked sense of humor — and a sharp understanding of how images and phrases live in our heads. At first glance, it reads like a clean, modernist abstraction: a bold bullseye of concentric color rings that immediately evokes Kenneth Noland’s target paintings from the 1960s. Noland’s work was all about pure formalism — color, shape, balance — painting stripped of narrative or sentiment. Kass appropriates that visual language, but then she breaks its seriousness by inserting text: “NOBODY PUTS BABY IN THE CORNER.” That phrase, lifted from Dirty Dancing, drags the whole piece out of high-modernist purity and into pop-cultural melodrama. It’s funny, but it’s also pointed: the line is about power, visibility, and reclaiming space. Kass turns a heroic, masculine-coded modernist symbol into a feminist punchline and a declaration. So the rug becomes a collision of worlds:     •    museum modernism (Noland’s canonical abstraction)     •    mass entertainment (a line everyone knows, even if they haven’t seen the movie)     •    domestic space (it’s literally under your feet, functioning as décor) And that’s where Kass is at her best: she collapses the hierarchy between “high art” and “low culture,” while also making you aware of how deeply gender plays into those hierarchies. The title/phrase makes the target no longer just a target — it becomes a stage, a spotlight, a territory. Baby isn’t in the corner anymore; Baby is dead center. Even as a rug, it keeps the conceptual bite. Rugs are traditionally decorative, feminine, and functional — not the heroic medium of painting. Kass weaponizes that too, turning something “soft” into a bold, graphic statement. It’s playful, loud, and instantly legible, but underneath it is a critique of art history’s seriousness and who gets centered in it. In other words: Kass takes Noland’s cool modernist target and makes it talk back. @bravinleerugeditions @debkass