The Secret Drawings of Jackie O

One of the central figures in Pepperstein’s mythology, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, was an object of his platonic pre-adolescent love and sincere admiration. Solving the assassination of her husband John F. Kennedy became an obsession that saw the young artist meticulously collect publications and any other information on the subject.

The project includes two texts, one of which is attributed to Jackie O herself and the other a testimony by Pepperstein as one of the experts invited to confirm her authorship of the drawings and collages presented in this room. The collages and drawings, as the story goes, were discovered in Minsk, at the house where Marina Oswald lived before she married Lee Harvey Oswald, Kennedy’s future assasin. The folder with the works also contained a letter written by Jackie O in 1975 on the Greek island of Skorpios. In the letter, she explains that following the advice of her two doctors, she has been putting the visions that haunted her onto paper in order to rid herself of them. Later, the reader finds out that the doctors themselves are figments of her imagination and Jackie’s drawings are part of her autotherapy. 

Although his work with characters in Jackie O clearly demonstrates Pepperstein’s mastery of conceptualist techniques, unlike the older generation of conceptualist artists he is not afraid of long, absorbing, and compositionally clear narratives that activate collective memory, intimate experiences, and mystical and religious revelations.