The Great Americans (2008) examines the connection between the American heroic and celebrity. These 39 portrait paintings explore a notion of the abject in celebrity. They point to our cultural obsession with beauty and how what is hot often coincides with an alien grotesqueness. Like ’48 Jews’, the uniform size, composition, and subject of the paintings in The Great Americans suggest a canon, Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party (1974-1979)

This series began from a Discovery Channel documentary which asked America to vote for the greatest American. America voted and in the top ten Oprah Winfrey ranked higher then Jonas Salk. The Great Americans explores the perverse nature of championing a talk show host above the inventor of the polio vaccine.