Titled OY/YO, this sculpture by Deborah Kass is part of the artist’s most recognizable and beloved series, since a monumental version of it first debuted as a public sculpture in Brooklyn Bridge Park in 2015. Its gleaming, modern form combined with its straightforward investigation of perspective—it says OY when viewed from one side, and YO when viewed from the other—elevates it to a perfect expression of both Pop Art and Pop Criticism. OY/YO evolved from a series of paintings Kass began exploring in 2009, in which she painted the words OY and YO in yellow on a blue background—an appropriation of Ed Ruscha’s famous painting OOF (1962). Large-scale, public versions of OY/YO are currently in the permanent collections of museums on opposite coasts: the Brooklyn Museum in New York and the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University in Palo Alto, CA.

Kass’s work has been shown nationally and internationally, including at the Venice Biennale, the Istanbul Biennale, and the Museum Ludwig, Cologne. The Andy Warhol Museum presented Deborah Kass, Before and Happily Ever After, Mid-Career Retrospective in 2012, with a catalogue published by Rizzoli. Work by Kass is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of Art, Solomon Guggenheim Museum, Jewish Museum, Museum of Fine Art, Boston, Cincinnati Museum, New Orleans Museum, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institute, Fogg/Harvard Museum, and many other museums and private collections. In 2018 Kass was inducted into the National Academy.