Elaine Sturtevant, professionally recognized as simply Sturtevant, spent her artistic career investigating the concepts of authenticity and originality in artmaking. The 1960s New York City art scene served as a playground of recognizable artistic styles from which Sturtevant could recreate, redesign, and appropriate, taking another artwork and reclaiming it as her own. Throughout her career, she became highly regarded for her carefully inexact repetitions of other artists’ paintings, sculptures, and photography. A chameleon of creativity, Sturtevant centered herself in the global argument of image appropriation; in her words, “Origins [are] a romantic notion…Remake, reuse, reassemble, recombine—that’s the way to go.”

–McKinley Neil, from the Glenstone Field Guide