To mark its 20th anniversary, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. has gifted 38,000 of Warhol’s original photographic works to galleries, art collections and college art museums across the country, including Cal State Long Beach’s University Art Museum.
Polaroid celebrity portraits make up most of the 152-piece collection gifted to CSULB’s UAM by the foundation of legendary pop culture artist Andy Warhol.
“Warhol: 15 mins/24 fps,” an exhibit featuring a selection of the Polaroids as well as some loaned screen prints, will open Thursday at the UAM.
“We’re very excited,” said Christoper Scoates, president of the UAM, “partly because the exhibit allows us to study Warhol’s use of photography. It allows students access to a part of Warhol’s working process that they might not have been aware of before. It was an amazing gift.”
After Warhol’s death in 1987, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. was established in New York.
“The aim of the program is to provide greater access to Warhol’s artwork and process,” foundation president Joel Wachs said in a press release, “and to enable a wide range of people from communities across the country to view and study this important yet relatively unknown body of Warhol’s work.”
Warhol became a world-famous artist in the 1960s with his portraits of celebrities like Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe, as well as his pop art renditions of iconic American products like Coke bottles and Campbell’s Soup cans.
But Warhol was known for more than just his paintings. He was a celebrated author, filmmaker, record producer and public figure, who coined the phrase “15 minutes of fame.”
“He was really the first artist to celebrate the notion of popular culture,” Scoates said. “His legacy includes film, music, fine arts, graphic design and design. There are two artists in the 20th century that have been hugely important in terms of shifting the paradigm in the way that we think about word. One of them is Marcel Duchamp and the other is Andy Warhol.”
As the exhibit displays, Warhol would take sometimes hundreds of Polaroids of his subjects before painting them. When he died, he left thousands of these Polaroids behind.
“When you’re taking somebody’s portrait, even today, people shoot test prints to make sure color and composition is right,” Scoates said.
“Polaroids were such a convenient way to get documentation very quickly, and they’re fun.”
In addition to the Polaroids, the exhibit will feature screen prints that have been loaned to the museum. Six of the 10 portraits from Warhol’s “Suite Of Athletes” collection will be on display, on loan from UCLA’s Hammer Museum, including O.J. Simpson, Dorothy Hamill and Jack Nicklaus. “The Witch,” a portrait of Margaret Hamilton from “The Wizard of Oz,” will also be displayed.
The museum will also reproduce the “Silver Cloud Installation,” an exhibition originally created for a 1966 show where Warhol wanted a room full of silver mylar balloons filled with helium moving with the room’s air currents, but it will be slightly reimagined.
The exhibit will be open to the public starting Thursday from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m., and will run through Dec. 14. Admission is free for students and $4 for guests.