Appropriation: Borrowing, Recontextualizing, and the Art of Taking

In 1981, Sherrie Levine photographed a catalogue reproduction of a Walker Evans photograph from 1936. The Evans photograph shows Allie Mae Burroughs, a sharecropper's wife in Alabama, staring into the camera with an expression that has become one of the defining images of the Great Depression. Levine printed her photograph of the reproduction, titled it After Walker Evans, and exhibited it in a New York gallery. She did not credit Walker Evans. She did not modify the image. She did not add anything. She took it. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, which owns the Evans archive, threatened legal action, and the exhibition was shut down. But the point had been made. Levine was asking a question that the art world could not ignore: what does it mean to author an image? What does originality amount to when every image is already a copy of something?

Appropriation in art is the practice of borrowing existing images, objects, or visual material and recontextualizing them as new artworks. The artist does not create the image from scratch. The artist takes it, and the act of taking, along with the shift in context, produces the meaning. Appropriation emerged as a named art strategy in the late 1970s and 1980s, rooted in Postmodernism's skepticism toward originality and authorship. It has since become one of the most debated practices in contemporary art, raising questions about copyright, power, colonialism, and the ethics of using other people's work.

This entry covers what appropriation is, how it emerged, which artists defined it, how it has been challenged by copyright law, and what contemporary research says about its evolving ethics.

What Is Appropriation in Art?

Appropriation is the deliberate borrowing of existing visual material for use in a new artwork. The borrowed material can be a photograph, a painting, a commercial advertisement, a film still, a cultural artifact, or any other pre-existing image or object. The artist who appropriates does not claim to have created the borrowed material. Instead, the artwork lies in the act of selection, the shift in context, and the new meanings that emerge from the juxtaposition of the original source and its new presentation.

Appropriation differs from collage in that it often involves a single, recognizable source rather than a composite of many fragments. It differs from found object art in that it typically involves images rather than physical objects. And it differs from parody or satire in that the appropriated material is not necessarily mocked or exaggerated. It is relocated, and the relocation itself is the artistic gesture.

The concept has roots in Marcel Duchamp's readymades, which established the principle that selection could be an artistic act. It also draws on the Cubist practice of incorporating newspaper and wallpaper into paintings, which Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque began around 1912. But appropriation as a self-conscious strategy emerged much later, in the context of postmodern theory. The critic Douglas Crimp organized the exhibition "Pictures" at Artists Space in New York in 1977, which introduced a generation of artists who used borrowed images. Crimp argued that these artists were not creating new images but revealing how images circulate, how they construct meaning, and how they shape subjectivity.

Historical Context and Origins

Appropriation as a named practice emerged in New York in the late 1970s. The artists associated with the "Pictures Generation," including Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, and Robert Longo, shared an approach to images that was fundamentally different from the Abstract Expressionist emphasis on personal expression and the Minimalist emphasis on formal reduction. These artists took images from advertising, film, television, and art history and re-presented them in gallery contexts.

The theoretical foundation came from French post-structuralism. Roland Barthes's essay "The Death of the Author" (1967) argued that the author's intention does not determine a text's meaning. Michel Foucault's "What Is an Author?" (1969) questioned the legal and institutional construction of authorship. Jacques Derrida's concept of deconstruction, which involved taking apart the binary oppositions that structure Western thought, provided a philosophical framework for taking apart images and reassembling them in new contexts. A 2025 study published in the Built Environment Project and Asset Management proceedings examined how academic artists in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, employ appropriation as a deconstructive strategy rooted in Derrida's thought. The study analyzed two case studies, Setyo Priyo Nugroho's Java 1830 and Amir Hamzah's The Great Day T(erri)rouble, showing how appropriation functions as a postcolonial strategy that renegotiates power dynamics between global and local contexts. Read the study at e-BPJ.

Key Artists and Their Practice

Sherrie Levine (b. 1947)

Levine's After Walker Evans (1981) is the most discussed appropriation artwork. She photographed reproductions of Evans's Depression-era photographs and exhibited them as her own work. The Metropolitan Museum of Art threatened to sue, and the exhibition was closed. Levine's gesture was not theft in the ordinary sense. It was a critique of authorship, ownership, and the mythology of the original. By re-photographing a reproduction rather than the original print, Levine also drew attention to the fact that every reproduction alters the image, and that what we think of as "Walker Evans" is often a copy of a copy of a copy.

Richard Prince (b. 1949)

Prince's early work involved re-photographing advertisements. His Cowboys series (1980-1992) re-photographed Marlboro cigarette advertisements, cropping out the text and presenting the images as fine art photographs. The Marlboro Man, a figure designed to sell cigarettes, became a figure about American mythology and the construction of masculinity. Prince's practice has been the subject of multiple copyright lawsuits. In 2008, photographer Patrick Cariou sued Prince for using 35 of his photographs of Rastafarians in Jamaica. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in 2013 that 25 of Prince's uses were fair use and sent five back to the lower court. The case was settled before trial. But the legal landscape shifted dramatically in 2023 when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Warhol Foundation v. Goldsmith that Andy Warhol's use of Lynn Goldsmith's photograph was not fair use. In January 2024, less than a year after the Warhol decision, Prince reached a consent judgment with two photographers who had sued him, giving them payment equal to five times the sale price of the works plus legal fees. Read about the case at Plagiarism Today.

Cindy Sherman (b. 1954)

Sherman's Untitled Film Stills (1977-1980) consist of 69 photographs in which Sherman poses as fictional female characters from imaginary B-movies. She did not appropriate specific images from existing films. She appropriated the visual language of Hollywood cinema. Each still looks like a publicity photograph from a film that does not exist. The work is appropriation because the source material is not a single image but a genre, a set of conventions about how women appear on camera. Sherman's work has been read as both a celebration and a critique of the way cinema constructs femininity.

Elaine Sturtevant (1924-2017)

Sturtevant began making exact reproductions of other artists' works in 1965. She reproduced Andy Warhol's Flowers, Jasper Johns's Flags, and Joseph Beuys's installations with painstaking accuracy, using the same techniques and materials. Warhol was amused and gave her one of his screens to help her reproduce his work. Other artists were less pleased. Sturtevant's work asks a different question from Levine's: not "what is authorship?" but "what is the difference between an original and a copy when the original is itself a product of mechanical reproduction?"

Adriana Varejao (b. 1964)

Varejao, a Brazilian artist, appropriates 16th-, 17th-, and 18th-century European artworks depicting Brazilian Indigenous peoples. A 2025 study published in Frontiers in Communication analyzed Varejao's Invitation Figures I and II through the concept of shanzhai, as developed by the philosopher Byung-Chul Han. Shanzhai refers to parodic creations that become "more original than the original" by intervening in, transforming, and updating artworks to address contemporary issues. The study argued that Varejao's appropriations challenge the racial and civilizational narratives historically used to naturalize subaltern social roles in Brazil. Read the study at Frontiers in Communication.

Appropriation and Copyright Law

The legal history of appropriation art has been turbulent. The central legal concept is "fair use," which allows limited use of copyrighted material without permission for purposes such as criticism, comment, parody, and scholarship. Whether appropriation art qualifies as fair use depends on whether the use is "transformative," meaning it adds new meaning or message to the original.

The Cariou v. Prince case (2013) was a high-water mark for appropriation artists. The Second Circuit found that 25 of Prince's uses were transformative because they presented the photographs in a fundamentally different context. But the 2023 Supreme Court ruling in Warhol Foundation v. Goldsmith narrowed the scope of transformativeness. The Court ruled that Warhol's series of silkscreens based on Lynn Goldsmith's photograph of Prince (the musician) was not fair use when licensed to a magazine, because the use was commercial and served a similar purpose to the original photograph. This ruling has had a chilling effect on appropriation artists.

A 2024 study published in the UCLA Law Review presented qualitative data from twenty interviews with leading contemporary artists, museum curators, and gallerists about their relationship to appropriation. The study found that contemporary artists are developing an ethics of appropriation almost entirely independent from copyright law. Artists who engaged in appropriation often sought licenses or informal permissions, not because of legal threats, but for ethical reasons. Other artists disavowed appropriative practices altogether, citing power and capital imbalances. Where artists did take without asking, it was from corporations rather than individuals, and they did so to comment on how the appropriated image perpetuates systems of unequal power. The study called this "critical appropriation." Interviewees uniformly expressed the belief that postmodernism's once-transgressive strategies of criticizing originality and authorship have become "hackneyed and trite." Read the study at UCLA Law Review.

A 2026 article published in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications (Nature) examined how generative AI is complicating the copyright landscape for appropriation. The article proposed an output-oriented test based on "substantial recognisable linkage," asking whether an AI-generated work can reasonably be perceived as drawing on protectable expression in a prior work. This framework, situated between copying and independent creation, may reshape how courts evaluate appropriation in the age of AI-generated images. Read the article at Nature Humanities and Social Sciences Communications.

Cultural Appropriation Versus Artistic Appropriation

The term "appropriation" in art history refers to a specific artistic practice. In broader cultural discourse, "cultural appropriation" refers to the taking of elements from a marginalized culture by members of a dominant culture, often without understanding or respect. The two concepts overlap but are not identical. Artistic appropriation is a formal strategy. Cultural appropriation is an ethical and political critique. An artwork can involve both, as in the case of Western artists borrowing from non-Western visual traditions, a practice with a long and problematic history that includes Post-Impressionist painters borrowing from Japanese prints and Cubist painters borrowing from African masks.

The Yogyakarta study from 2025 demonstrated how appropriation can function as a postcolonial counter-strategy. Artists in Indonesia appropriate colonial-era imagery and global pop culture to critique the legacies of colonialism and the power dynamics between global and local contexts. The study identified parody, pastiche, and recontextualization as the primary techniques, showing that appropriation is not always a gesture of taking. It can also be a gesture of talking back.

How to Analyze an Appropriation Artwork

Start by identifying the source. What image, object, or visual material has the artist borrowed? Is it from art history, advertising, film, news media, or another source? The source matters because it determines what meanings are being recontextualized. Richard Prince's appropriation of Marlboro ads comments on the construction of American masculinity through commercial imagery. Sherman's appropriation of film conventions comments on the construction of femininity through cinema.

Next, determine what the artist has changed. Has the image been cropped, enlarged, overlaid, combined with other images, or presented unchanged? The degree of alteration affects both the meaning and the legal status. Sherrie Levine changed nothing. She re-photographed a reproduction and presented it. The absence of alteration was the point: it exposed how thin the line between original and copy really is.

Finally, ask what new meaning the recontextualization produces. The gap between the original context and the new context is where the artwork happens. A Marlboro ad in a magazine sells cigarettes. The same ad, cropped and hung in a gallery, becomes a commentary on American myth-making. The image has not changed. The meaning has.

Related Terms and Concepts

Appropriation is closely connected to Postmodernism, the theoretical framework from which it emerged. It relates to the readymade and the found object, which established the principle of selection as artistic act. It connects to collage, which involves combining borrowed fragments into a new whole. It overlaps with Pop Art, which borrowed from commercial imagery. For more on how images circulate and change meaning, read our post on how context changes meaning or our guide to the role of the viewer.

See Appropriation Art in Person

Sherrie Levine's work is held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Richard Prince's Cowboys series is in the collection of the Guggenheim Museum and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Stills are at the Museum of Modern Art, which acquired the complete series in 1995. Elaine Sturtevant's reproductions are in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art and the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven.

For more on the strategies and debates surrounding appropriation, read our entries on Postmodernism, collage, and Pop Art, or explore our post on why abstract art makes people uncomfortable to learn more about how challenging conventions shapes the art experience.