Study for Sturtevant’s Marilyns

I find myself in a lot of conversations about what qualifies as art. Is coming up with an AI prompt art? What about a banana taped to a wall? What if other people’s photos are collaged together on Photoshop? In these conversations I always bring up Sturtevant’s Marilyns. With access to Warhol’s original silkscreens, she followed the exact same process as Warhol and put them up in galleries. In a CNC for Sculpture class I took in the spring, our professor allowed us, and sometimes encouraged us, to find already-made .stl files online to incorporate into our projects. When our final assignment was to make a bust, I immediately went searching for an .stl of Marilyn. I carved her out on the CNC indexer, then painted her with Sturtevant’s Marilyns as a reference.