Andy Warhol: Selected Photographs and Prints From the Collection
January 29 – March 3, 2011
Curators | Begovich Gallery Director, Mike McGee & Guest Curator, Matt Jarvis
About the Exhibition
Andy Warhol: Selected Photographs and Prints From the Collection marks the first time that the photographic collection has been shown on campus. The exhibit includes two Warhol prints that had previously been donated to the university.
“The exhibit provides a glimpse into Warhol’s image-making process,” says Mike McGee, gallery director. “Multiple Polaroid shots of the same subject are shown together — the artist’s first step in preparing his large-scale silkscreen paintings, drawings and prints. Many are of recognizable public figures, such as Tatum O’Neal and John McEnroe.”
“There is a great sadness present in a Polaroid picture. More so in Warhol's than others simply because of who he was able to take pictures of,” writes guest curator and art historian Matt Jarvis, in an essay about the exhibition. “The whole of a person is reduced in an instant to a snapshot — but not a singular snapshot, one of many, hundreds, thousands. To sit for a Warhol photograph was to be the same as all who came before and would come after. Merely, the sitter lasts in relation to Warhol: we do not look at the picture because of who the subject is, we look at the picture because of Andy Warhol.”
Excerpted from an article which originally appeared in Inside CSUF, January 11, 2011.