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Billy Jacobs
The Interrogation (Lee Harvey Oswald)
2024
oil on linen
12 x 16 inches
Lee Harvey Oswald joined the Marines when he was 17 and was murdered by Jack Ruby at the age of 24. In his short life, Oswald worked at a top-secret radar base in Atsugi, Japan, defected to the Soviet Union, and married the niece of a Soviet intelligence officer before repatriating to the US in 1962. For the next two years, Oswald crisscrossed the American South, interacting with Marxists, Cuban exiles, intelligence assets and agents. Witnesses later claimed to have seen Oswald with Jack Ruby, as well as CIA-linked figures like Clay Shaw, David Ferrie, and David Atlee Philips. The FBI, CIA, and KGB kept extensive files on Oswald, only portions of which have only been made publicly available in the last 30 years. It is unclear why a misanthropic loner kept bumping into government spooks and paramilitary operators. Libras are known for weighing all the available options, and having trouble making decisions.
Billy Jacobs
Airstrike on Dealey Plaza
2024
oil on canvas
34 x 32 inches
The photographic imagery of the Kennedy assassination is among the most iconic of the 20th century—from the Warholian, grainy black-and-white stills to the highly saturated blurs of the Zapruder film. The bloodletting is juxtaposed with the crisp, clear midday light. The aesthetic of the assassination encapsulated what would be its eventual effect, the shattering of a confident American optimism in a sudden spasm of violence.
In Airstrike on Dealey Plaza, the assassination is restaged at night, evoking the gray murk of Cold War espionage. That is the shadow-world where the conspirators no doubt began their careers. Offing Kennedy was, to them, merely one more covert operation, the toppling of another dangerous leader who had been preventing them from attacking global Communism head-on. Allen Dulles believed this grand, ideological battle could be best waged without soldiers on battlefields, but rather through subterfuge, perception-management, and occasional targeted killings. The clandestine warfare he first envisioned would subtend American foreign policy for the next fifty years.
Billy Jacobs
Cranial Explosion (Libra)
2024
oil on linen
12 x 16 inches
Cranial Explosion depicts the CIA archivist from Don DeLillo’s 1988 novel Libra, which was among the first artworks to present a fictionalized narrative of the Kennedy assassination. The novel switches between the narrative of Oswald’s life and the fictional CIA archivist who is tasked with writing an official history of the CIA's involvement. The archivist becomes a bit of an idealized self for all the researchers who have become obsessed with the assassination and its cosmography.
The painting’s title is adapted from the text of a 2023 article published in New York Magazine, “The Secrets of the JFK Assassination Archive,” by journalist and noted Libra Scott Sayare. This article marked the first time that the revelations about the CIA’s involvement with Lee Harvey Oswald prior to the assassination were published in the mainstream media.
Billy Jacobs
Lone Gunman
2024
oil on linen
12 x 16 inches
Beginning with the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the Sixties were punctuated by the assassinations of various historical figures. In almost every instance, law enforcement blamed the murder on a lone gunman. Coupled with a rising skepticism towards authority, these dubious stories caused alternative theories about the killings to fester. The general paranoia was partially vindicated with the revelations of the Church Committee, in 1976. Among other things, the Committee uncovered a CIA foreign assassination program known as ZR/RIFLE; the existence of an official program of such blatant illegality caused many to wonder just how much further the Agency might be willing to go.
Ever since Oswald had claimed to be “just a patsy” on national television, there had been questions about whether this rather unremarkable young man could have been capable of orchestrating the great tragedy of which he was accused. The trope of the inexperienced and ideologically confused "lone gunman" became a dog-whistle to conspiracy theorists, signifying a cover up by some powerful cabal. In Lone Gunmen, a wounded spy slouches from the Dallas School Book Depository toward Mar-a-Lago, prepared to reprise his historical role.
Billy Jacobs
Aries (Allen Dulles)
2024
oil on Doty Panel
8 x 9 inches
Aries are known for being strong-willed, and natural leaders, with a predilection for war.
Dulles conceived of the CIA as a sort of shadow government, with only loose ties to the official policies of the United States. His brother, John Foster Dulles, was Eisenhower’s Secretary of State; Allen liked to joke that he was the “Secretary of State to the unfriendly countries.” These White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant brothers shared a sincere terror of the Communist threat, and their early careers as corporate lawyers at Sullivan & Cromwell gave them a marked sympathy—and personal ties—to the industrialists and aristocracy of old Europe, and of Nazi Germany in particular.
While serving as Director of the CIA, Allen Dulles and JFK had a contentious relationship. Kennedy eventually fired Dulles over the disastrous invasion at the Bay of Pigs. In 1963, though he was no longer a government employee, Dulles seems to have spent the weekend of JFK’s assassination at “The Farm”—the CIA’s training base at Camp Peary, Virginia. Why he was there remains a mystery.
Billy Jacobs
Allen Dulles and James Angleton
2024
oil on linen
24 x 18 Inches
Allen Dulles and James Angleton were chief architects of the US’s covert foreign policy during the 1950s and 1960s. Dulles was the longest serving director of the CIA and helped to expand its remit from mere intelligence gathering to covert paramilitary operations. Angleton ran the CIA’s counterintelligence staff, which made him one of the most feared and well-informed men in government. Thanks to recently declassified documents, we now know that Angleton had taken a special interest in Lee Harvey Oswald before the assassination: tracking his movements, reading his mail, and concealing the existence of this surveillance even from others in the CIA. Many researchers believe that Oswald was being used to infiltrate and disrupt domestic leftist organizations.
Billy Jacobs
Virgo (Bill Harvey)
2024
oil on linen
14 x 12 inches
William “King” Harvey had an illustrious career during the early Cold War. He exposed Kim Philby as a Soviet mole, he was CIA station chief for West Berlin from 1952 until 1960, and in the early 1960s he was put in charge of ZR/RIFLE, the CIA’s assassination program. In recently declassified CIA documents, Harvey was shown to be the organizer of numerous assassination attempts on Fidel Castro, and to have contributed to the assassination of Patrice Lumumba. According to researcher Mary Haverstick, there is evidence to suggest that he oversaw yet another project, this one in the latter months of 1963.
Virgos are known for their fastidious attention to detail. Harvey shares a birthday with the artist.
Billy Jacobs
Persons of Interest
2024
oil on canvas
60 x 77 inches
Persons of Interest collects the enigmatic figures who appear in photographs of Dealey Plaza on the day of the assassination. Many of these people have never been positively identified, and there has been endless speculation about their possible involvement in the killing. Some researchers claim to have spotted among them such infamous characters as Frank Sturgis, E. Howard Hunt, June Cobb, and George Bush, Sr. Other figures are known to us only by descriptive monikers: Umbrella Man, Babushka Lady, the Three Tramps, or Badge Man, the possible shooter on the grassy knoll. At the bottom of the canvas, a spy lurks in the sewers beneath the plaza, gazing up at an image of the scene above him. This underworld space is a nod to Martin Johnson Heade’s Gremlin in the Studio II, in which the painting’s placid landscape is offset by a monster emerging from below.
Billy Jacobs
The Execution of Lee Harvey Oswald
2024
oil on linen
14 x 11 inches
Shortly after the assassination of JFK, Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested for the murder of a Dallas police officer. Oswald was held at police headquarters for questioning. It is unclear when exactly he realized that he was a suspect in the murder of the president, but when he was brought before reporters later in the day, he famously declared that he was “just a patsy.” Two days later, Oswald was being led through the parking garage, on his way to the Dallas County jail (ironically located in Dealey Plaza). Jack Ruby, a mob-connected nightclub owner, stepped out of the crowd of reporters and policemen and fired a bullet into Oswald’s gut. Ruby was yet another lone gunman, who appeared out of obscurity to change the course of history. Ruby’s motivations remain unclear even today. He died in prison in 1967 claiming to have more information about the assassination.
The Execution of Lee Harvey Oswald restages this iconic moment in a landscape and composition similar to Eduard Manet’s The Execution of Emperor Maximilian.
Billy Jacobs
One-way Mirror
2024
oil on linen
14 x 11 inches
Two men meet to discuss Oswald. It is unclear if a shadow is being cast on a mirror, or if someone is watching from the other side. Oswald repeatedly encountered intelligence agents, spies, mercenaries, and government handlers in his short life. It seems unlikely that he understood the extent to which he was being watched over. The gravity of his predicament may have occurred to him only once he was under arrest, sitting in the headquarters of the Dallas Police. Unfortunately, no records of his interrogation there remain.
Billy Jacobs
Country on the Click (Butler PA & Mar a Lago)
2024
oil on linen
16 x 20 inches
Country on the Click (Butler, PA and Mar a Lago) echoes the iconography of Person of Interest, but instead depicts the two assassination attempts on presidential candidate Donald J. Trump in the summer of 2023. Both shootings were committed by lone gunmen with murky and internally contradictory political ideologies. Within hours of the attempts, online theorists had imagined conspiracies implicating the Deep State, Mossad, the CIA, the Democrats, and every other possible cabal. This paranoid style is to no small degree the heritage of the Kennedy assassination
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