A website for a fictional painter is using Jordan Casteel’s paintings, she says

A website built around a painter named Rebecca Tremblay displays paintings and photographs belonging to artist Jordan Casteel, who says she has no connection to the site or its operator.

The site tremblayrebecca.art describes Tremblay as a figurative oil painter born in Montréal in 1990, who lives and works in Chicago. Casteel was born in Denver in 1989 and lives and works in New York.

“It has come to my attention that an individual or entity using the name ‘Rebecca Tremblay’ has created a website using images of me and my artwork without my knowledge or permission, and has been contacting people regarding purported exhibitions and opportunities,” Casteel wrote in an Instagram post from her verified account. The notice was signed “Jordan Casteel Studio, August 2026.”

“To be clear, I have no affiliation with ‘Rebecca Tremblay,’ tremblayrebecca.art, or any correspondence coming from this identity,” she wrote.

Casteel said messages were sent to people “regarding purported exhibitions and other opportunities associated with this false identity.”

“Do not provide personal information, send funds, open attachments or links,” she wrote, urging anyone who received the messages to report them to their email provider.

The site’s home page, headed “Featured Works,” shows several paintings alongside photographs of a person presented as Tremblay. Casteel said the images are hers.

The site’s “about” page credits Tremblay with a bachelor’s degree from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2013 and a master’s from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2017. It says she was born to a French-Canadian father and an Algonquin Anishinaabe mother, grew up in Baltimore, and counts Kerry James Marshall, Alice Neel and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye as influences.

Casteel earned her master’s degree from the Yale School of Art in 2014. She was an artist-in-residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem from 2015 to 2016 and taught painting at Rutgers University in Newark from 2016 to 2021.

She received a MacArthur Foundation fellowship in 2021. Her portrait of the designer Aurora James ran on the cover of Vogue’s September 2020 issue, and her near-life-size portraits of Harlem residents, subway riders and her own students have shown at the New Museum in New York and the Denver Art Museum.

Casteel is represented by Casey Kaplan gallery in New York and by Thaddaeus Ropac. Alice Neel, named as an influence on the Tremblay site, is a painter Casteel has cited as an influence on her own work.

Using publicly available technical records, Urgent Matter investigated the site further. The evidence indicates that the scam operates primarily through email, with the website serving as a public portfolio to lend credibility to the false identity. The site's operator concealed their identity through a domain privacy service, and the domain has no email infrastructure.

Registration records show the domain was created July 13 through the registrar Hostinger, with the registrant’s name, organization, email, phone and address hidden behind a privacy service. The record lists Lithuania, where Hostinger is based, as the registrant’s country.

A security certificate for the site was issued by Let’s Encrypt the same day and expires on October 11, 2026. Such certificates encrypt connections between a visitor’s browser and the website, allowing the site to use HTTPS.

The home page captured by the scanning service urlscan.io loaded only the site’s images and font files from Google, with no contact form, tracking scripts or cookies, records show. The site has a separate contact page that the scan did not capture. Urlscan is an automated service that records information about a page’s content, connections and behavior when loaded.

Urlscan scanned the page once on July 15, two days after the domain was registered, and returned “No classification.” Google Safe Browsing also had no classification for the site. Both services mainly identify security threats like malware and phishing, not scams relying on impersonation. Neither flagged the site as malicious.

The domain has no mail server and no SPF, DKIM or DMARC records, DNS records compiled by SecurityTrails show. A mail server sends or receives email for a domain, while SPF, DKIM and DMARC are technical standards used to authenticate email and reduce spoofing. The absence of these records indicates the domain lacks its own configured email infrastructure.

Instead, the website lists two Gmail addresses for “Tremblay”: tremblayrebeccah@gmail.com and bookings.tremblayrebeccca@gmail.com.

It was not immediately clear whether Tremblay is a real person, but Urgent Matter could not find independent evidence of an artist operating under that name.

“I’m very grateful to those who have reached out to alert me and my studio,” Casteel wrote. Her studio asked anyone who has been contacted, or who has information, to forward it to Casey Kaplan.

The notice does not say how many people were contacted or whether anyone sent money or information.

The news come months after imposters were revealed to be posing as ARTnews editors in an apparent attempt to solicit money from artists, the publication warned. Artists said at the time that the tactic has become increasingly common.

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