Rachel Harrison

(b. 1966)

New York-based artist Rachel Harrison combines images from politics, pop culture, and high art—a Dick Cheney mask, Leonardo DiCaprio photos, Picasso sketches—into idiosyncratic assemblages. Mixing sensibilities of major postwar American art movements such as Neo-Dada, Minimalism, and Pop (critic and art historian Hal Foster called her the love child of Andy Warhol and Eva Hesse), Harrison’s drawings and sculptures reconsider the art historical canon and cult figures of contemporary life. Since the 1990s, Harrison has imbued her explorations of celebrity culture and myth-making with both humor and a dark awareness of the social violence they facilitate.