Deborah Kass Jewish Jackie 1992

  • Not on view

In 1992, Kass embarked on The Warhol Project, a multiyear series responding to the celebrity portraits of Pop artist Andy Warhol. In Jewish Jackie, Kass takes Warhol’s paintings that repeat an image of former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis in profile and replaces her with actress and singer Barbra Streisand. While growing up as a Jewish American girl, Kass noticed that people on television and in movies looked different than she did. Streisand, also Jewish, was someone with whom she could identify: “I had never seen a movie star that looked like Barbra, which is to say that looked like me and everyone I knew,” she says.

Kass’s work could be considered both an homage to Andy Warhol and a critique of exclusionary depictions of glamour and beauty in mainstream media. For Kass, appropriating Warhol’s work allowed her to insert aspects her identity into the history of art: “In my own work I replace Andy’s male homosexual desire with my own specificity: Jew love, female voice, and blatant lesbian diva worship.”

Medium
Xerox
Dimensions
composition 16 x 20 9/16" (40.7 x 52.3 cm)
Publisher
Deborah Kass
Edition
60
Credit
Purchase
Object number
16.1993
Copyright
© 2023 Deborah Kass / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Department
Drawings and Prints
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