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.”
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Pop art
A movement comprising initially British, then American artists in the 1950s and 1960s. Pop artists borrowed imagery from popular culture—from sources including television, comic books, and print advertising—often to challenge conventional values propagated by the mass media, from notions of femininity and domesticity to consumerism and patriotism.
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