A Trip To The Warhol

Your PopCulteer is still playing catch-up. I’ve been so busy with travel and outside projects that I have a massive stack of toys, DVDs, books and comics to review, and I still have tons of photo essays to finish.

Today it’s a photo essay.  We’re going back to late August, when, on the day after our anniversary, your humble blogger and his wife were joined by my sister, Debbie, and my nephew, Gino, who treated us to our first visit to The Andy Warhol Museum, in Pittsburgh.

The Andy Warhol Museum is located on the North Shore of Pittsburgh, and it’s the largest museum in North America dedicated to a single artist. The museum holds an extensive permanent collection of art and archives from the Pittsburgh-born pop art icon Andy Warhol. Priming our interest was the recent Warhol exhibit at Charleston’s Clay Center, which closed earlier this year.

The art is not exclusively Warhol’s. We’re treated to a healthy dose of his many collaborations with other artists, as well as art, artifacts, toys and cool facets from his life’s archives. It really makes you feel better about being a packrat.

It’s also a multimedia experience, with art, film, music, video and tactile exhibits that let you touch the artworks.

One nice, and funny, touch is that the attendant’s booth in the parking lot across the street is modeled after Warhol’s design for the Brillo Pad package.

Now, because so much of Warhol’s work is protected by copyright, I’m not going to just bring you hundreds of photos. You can get a taste of that by visiting the museum’s website. Visitors are free to take as many pictures as they want, but publishing them is an entirely different matter, and since PopCult is legally a publication, I want to respect their rights and stick to fair use and transformative works. Besides, you really have to go in person to get the full effect.

The museum itself is a delight. You start on the seventh floor and work your way down for a chronological presentation that blends Warhol’s life story with the historical context of his time, and examples of how he participated and influenced the blending of art and pop culture. We also see the many artists whose time in his orbit launched their careers and made an even wider mark on the world of art.

Warhol managed to bridge the gap between advertising and commercial art and the world of fine art and The Andy Warhol Museum is the perfect way to to learn, or be reminded, of just exactly how revolutionary a feat that was.

A visit to the museum is a great trip, both fun and enlightening, and you can find all the details on admission and hours at their website. Mel and I want to go back sometime in the future.

Let’s look at some photos from our trip…

The lobby includes the couch from Warhol’s famed Factory Studio, underneath a portrait of Warhol sitting on it.

Almost every floor had, near the elevator, a 3D version of Warhol’s designs, in plastic, which you were allowed to touch.

Brillo variants and prototypes in front of floral paintings

From the self-portrait room, I grabbed a photo with Andy of the 1950s.

Debbie, Gino and yours truly, really leaning into the Warhol vibe (photo by Mel).

My sister, Debbie, in the money…or at least between it.

Gino, with the Statue of Liberty copying his pose.

Just a fraction of Warhol’s vast collections of coll stuff was on display.

A closer look reveals Fiestaware, tin toys and advertising ephemera among the treats.

I went in closer to see more of the stuff that shaped Warhol’s vision

Some see dinnerware, all I can see is the tin space capsule

It’s got to be cool to have an assortment of magazines with articles about you or covers designed by you

There was evidence that he never threw anything away

The rather large gift shop was filled with lots of pop culture touchstones. This selection of books is just one tiny portion of what they had to offer

We leave you with a quick look at the Sharif Bey: Homecoming exhibition, which closes next Monday. Bey’s work is shown alongside works by Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat, and the experience is almost overwhelming.