Deborah Kass ─ Before and Happily Ever After

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.

Lisa Liebmann and Brooks Adams are writers and art critics based in Paris and New York.
Griselda Pollock is Director of the Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History and Professor of Social and Critical Histories of Art at the University of Leeds.
Irving Sandler is an art critic and historian, contributing editor at Art in America, and professor emeritus at the State University of New York.
Eric C. Shiner is director of The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh.
Robert Storr is a curator, writer, and Dean of the Yale School of Art.
John Waters is an American film director, author, actor and photographer.