Bill Clinton and The Blue Dress
The Artist Who Painted Jeffrey Epstein’s Portrait of Bill Clinton in a Dress Tells Us Why She Made It, and What It Means
Petrina Ryan-Kleid wants to clear up a few things about the image.
- Australian-born artist Petrina Ryan‑Kleid found herself thrust into a viral art-politics junction when her 2012 painting Parsing Bill (depicting Bill Clinton in a blue dress) was revealed to have been displayed in the home of Jeffrey Epstein.
- The work was created as a student piece at the New York Academy of Art, intended as a satirical commentary on how presidents are caricatured.
- Since the attention explosion, Ryan-Kleid has distanced herself from the political narrative, clarified the piece’s original intention, and acknowledged the discomfort the situation brought her as an artist whose thesis work took on unintended life.
