In 1992, Kass embarked on The Warhol Project, a multiyear series responding to the celebrity portraits of Pop artist Andy Warhol.. In the Jewish Jackie Series, 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 can be considered both an homage to Andy Warhol and a critique of exclusionary depictions of glamour and beauty in mainstream media.
