Mrs. Kennedy stared at the ground. Her pink Chanel suit was stained with the blood of her husband, President John F. Kennedy, who’d been assassinated hours earlier. Silently, she stood aboard Air Force One and watched as Lyndon B. Johnson placed his left hand on her husband’s Catholic prayer book. He raised his right hand in the air and took the oath of office. The inauguration was over in half a minute. 

To open a newspaper and see Jackie Kennedy in that fragile state was shocking to Americans who were drawn to her elegance and charisma. Andy Warhol was among those struck by the images. 

“Warhol likely saw this icon of glamour and was drawn to her stoicism and sadness,” says Heather White, director of learning at The Warhol. “Kennedy was the youngest president we’ve ever had, and his wife was introducing new styles and fashions. … Everyone was obsessed.”

A year later, Warhol released his portrait series, Jackie, with more than  300 screenprints created from magazine and newspaper coverage of that fateful day in Dallas. Guests can view Warhol’s isolation of Jackie’s grief in the six prints currently on display at The Andy Warhol Museum. The image shown here is the only one of these prints that doesn’t reveal her entire face. Instead, she looks down at the ground, her hair shielding her from the camera. 

“People were impressed with the way she carried herself, which was focused on by the media,” says White. “The White House began to be referred to as ‘Camelot’— the Kennedys were almost royalty.”  In the selected print, however, Warhol grants Jackie a moment of refuge. Here, she is not an untouchable fashion icon or on the front page of  any newspaper; she is allowed to be vulnerable. 

Within each print, Warhol inked the widow in blue, gold, or white. White explains that these colors are similar to the palette of St. John Chrysostom Byzantine Catholic Church—the church that Warhol was raised in—likening Jackie to a saint. Even decades after Jackie was unveiled, Warhol remained captivated by her radiance. In his Exposures publication from 1980, he wrote, “As we walked through the galleries every person recognized Jackie. They didn’t come too close. They stopped for a minute, looked, and whispered. You could hear her name in the air: ‘Jackie. Jackie.’ … Being with her is like walking with a saint.”

The post Closer Look: Portrait of a Grieving American Icon appeared first on Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh.

In many ways, it looks like your typical prom story: mulling over an outfit to fit the theme, messing up makeup right before the dance begins, equal parts anxiety and excitement over how the night goes.

But when 16-year-old Ava is shopping for her prom dress, it carries a special weight. It’ll be her first time wearing a dress since coming out as transgender.

Ava’s story, and those of other attendees at The Andy Warhol Museum’s LGBTQ+ Youth Prom last year, are the subject of (pride/prom), a feature-length documentary from the museum’s boutique production studio, The Warhol Creative.

The 2024 prom was the event’s 10th anniversary, and the theme—Welcome to the Queernival—gave the team at The Warhol Creative an opportunity to explore the emotional depth of the queer experience: joy, hardship, and all the gray areas in between.

Ava accidentally came out to her mother, Chrissy, in a message intended for someone else. When Chrissy found out, she hugged Ava.

But the film doesn’t shy away from the messy parts: In a tearful interview, Chrissy admits she struggles to use she/her pronouns for Ava, often settling on they/them or occasionally misgendering her.

“I want to be that safe place for my kid,” she says in the film. “As a parent, that’s what you should be. Your kids should always be able to come to you as who they are, and you just accept them.”

News clips about anti-LGBTQ+ legislation and sentiments make up a small part of the film’s narrative, but the challenges the young people face is only one part of their experience.

New York-based director Sam McCoy let the subjects of the film guide it, and the documentary is imbued with giddy excitement. In one scene, Vlad, a 16-year-old transgender boy, draws on a villainous curled mustache for the prom. In another, Chrissy refuses to stop saying “body-ody-ody” when discussing the fit of dresses on her daughter, much to Ava’s dismay.

“It was all about capturing them and their essence and them as human beings,” says McCoy, who uses they/them pronouns. “It really was documentation and making sure that they were being captured authentically.”

During a private screening in March, the audience was rarely quiet, sharing laughs as Ava and her mom bantered while dress shopping and ooo’ing and aww’ing as the kids tried on outfits. When the credits rolled, a chorus of cheers and whistles carried through the theater.

“It was all about capturing them and their essence and them as human beings. It really was documentation and making sure that they were being captured authentically.”

Sam McCoy, Director of (pride/prom)

The team at The Warhol Creative turned the film around in just a few months after the prom in June 2024, bolstered by a capable team of The Warhol Academy filmmaking and postproduction fellows in The Pop District office next door to the museum.

A sizzle—or short promotional video—for (pride/prom) produced in 2023 even attracted the eye of one of Pittsburgh’s most established queer figures, actor and singer Billy Porter, and The Brutalist producer D.J. Gugenheim, both of whom became executive producers.

The project gave fellows—and former fellows turned Warhol Creative hires like Aaliyah Lewis and Ezra Jones—their first film credits. From the sizzle  to the final cut, upwards of 30 fellows worked on the film.

“For most of us, this is our first feature-length film credit,” says Jones, assistant editor and junior producer. “We all have IMDb pages now, whether it be editor or producer—that’s an awesome thing to have that you can show people and say, ‘Hey, yeah, this is what I’ve done.’”

There will be a public screening of the film at The Warhol on June 20. And while there are no plans for a film at this year’s prom, that won’t stop Vlad from planning an elaborate outfit for the cryptid-themed dance.

At a panel after the screening, Vlad says the film has a simple but important message: “community, community, community.”

“As we have this communication with each other and this love for each other and this support for each other,” Vlad says, “we will continue to survive, and not only to survive, but to flourish.”

The post Lights, camera, production appeared first on Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh.

For Andrej and Julia Warhola, however, their youngest son was the dream. The Warholas knew Andy’s talent was undeniable. Determined to save enough money to ensure his future, Andy’s father worked long hours on construction sites and in coal mines. Andrej died in 1942, hoping his son would be able to continue studying art at a nearby university.

Andy not only earned a fine arts degree in pictorial design from Carnegie Institute of Technology, but also earned the distinction of being the first in his family to go to college.

It was during Warhol’s tenure at Carnegie Tech (now known as Carnegie Mellon University) that one professor prophetically observed that he was “the only student that had a product to sell.”

Those “products” are the subject of The Andy Warhol Museum’s latest exhibition. Running through September 1, Good Business: Andy Warhol’s Screenprints offers a closer look at the artist’s works on paper.

Shortly after graduating in 1949, a young Andrew Warhola took his wares and moved to New York City in search of fame and fortune. Andy Warhol would eventually find both, but he began his professional career as an illustrator for fashion magazines and retailers. His unique blotted-line style, a technique that combined drawing with basic printmaking, distinguished him from the competition. He was in high demand, but he knew he didn’t want to work exclusively as a Madison Avenue adman.

“Art historians have tried to describe a moment in Warhol’s career, around 1963, where he moves from something called commercial art to something called fine art,” says Alex Taylor, an associate professor in the University of Pittsburgh’s history of art and architecture department.

“I think that’s a false path, a false dichotomy,” he continues. “These two things always coexisted. Almost all successful artists have an eye to business, but they often try to hide it.”

Warhol, however, was surprisingly candid about his ambitions. He never completely abandoned his commercial and commissioned undertakings even as he gained prominence as a Pop art pioneer.

“He was always clear and transparent that he was there to make money,” says Amber Morgan, The Andy Warhol Museum’s director of collections and exhibitions, who curated this exhibition. “He was a very savvy businessman who was running many different types of businesses at the same time. There was Interview magazine and his film company. He was a painter, photographer, film director, entrepreneur, and commercial artist.”

In fact, by the mid-1970s, Warhol famously quipped, “Business art is the step that comes after art. … Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.”

Uneasy bedfellows

Art and money have a long and complicated relationship. There are those who say artists should stay true to their craft—no matter what the cost. But even some of history’s most renowned artists accepted the financial realities of their profession.

Without the financial backing of the Medici family, Leonardo da Vinci may have been forced to take on a side gig­—something akin to a 15th-century DoorDash driver—to support his work, and the world may never have experienced some of his most profound works.

“Sometimes it’s thought of as a little gauche to talk about money,” Morgan says. “Artists shouldn’t sell out.” That was especially true during the counterculture movement of the ’60s and ’70s, a time when the younger generation actively and vocally rejected the values and norms of their parents.

“One of the reasons why the modernist avant-garde became so paranoid about the appearance of profit was the sense that it disqualified their products from being serious artistic achievements,” says Taylor, the author of Forms of Persuasion: Art and Corporate Image in the 1960s. “What is so distinctive about Warhol is that he’s making profit the point, leaning into it. In some ways, it was the very subject of his art.”

It is this intersection—the place where creativity and capitalism collide—that Good Business: Andy Warhol’s Screenprints sets out to explore. The show offers visitors a wealth of Warhol’s works on paper; and yet the nearly 100 works on display are just a fraction of the roughly 20,000 prints Warhol created throughout his practice.

“What is so distinctive about Warhol is that he’s making profit the point, leaning into it. In some ways, it was the very subject of his art.”

Alex Taylor, associate professor in the University of Pittsburgh’s History of Art and Architecture department

According to Morgan, there’s a misconception that prints and posters (what you might hang up in a dorm room) are the same. They are not. “When we talk about Warhol’s prints, we’re talking about original works of art that are very collectible,” she says.

Nowadays, these works are relatively rare and prohibitively expensive for the average art aficionado, but once upon a time, they were rolling off the presses. Their availability made them affordable for fans and invaluable to Warhol, who recognized them as a reliable source of discretionary income.

Warhol embraced the mechanical and economically viable nature of screenprinting early in his career and quickly put his own stamp on the process, creating multiples of a single image and using bold, almost psychedelic layers of color.

Marilyn, Space Fruit, and Dollar Signs

The show features many of his greatest hits, including portraits of (Chairman) Mao, Mona (Lisa), and Marilyn (Monroe), not to mention Campbell’s soup cans; his first known screenprints of $1 and $2 bills produced from his hand-drawn acetates; and Space Fruit: Lemons, a series of partially completed prints (each a framed piece highlighting the addition of a specific color).

One aspect of Warhol’s personal and professional life that tends to get little attention is also an integral part of the show. “We don’t always talk about his generous side,” Morgan says. “But Warhol would use his name and celebrity to support things that were important to him.” In other words, he would create prints that could be sold to help raise awareness for causes (endangered species) or politicians (George McGovern, Jimmy Carter) he believed in.

One example in Good Business, notable as much for its “diamond dust” sparkle as its philanthropic origins, is the never-before-displayed portrait of Mildred Scheel, founder of the German Cancer Society.

“We don’t always talk about his generous side. But Warhol would use his name and celebrity to support things that were important to him.” 

Amber Morgan, The Andy Warhol Museum’s director of collections and exhibitions

Keeping the business theme top of mind, an entire section is devoted to Warhol’s dollar signs. “We have a bunch of them,” Morgan notes, “so we’re able to see Warhol playing with the same image. There are different colors, different sizes, multiple dollar signs, and single dollar signs.”

This cluster of prints allows viewers to engage in what The Warhol’s director of learning, Heather White, likes to call “deep looking.”

“Screenprints look—and feel—different than works on canvas,” she says. “In a lot of Warhol’s canvases, you can see the paint strokes and the texture of the paint. By contrast, the flatness of the prints is really apparent, and the colors feel a lot more matte.”

“This show has a large education component, and we’re tasked with showing the process. It’s exciting to be able to geek out about printmaking.”

Heather White, The Warhol’s director of learning

Other factors come into the picture as well. There’s the choice of paper: record-cover stock, museum board, bond or high white? There’s the overlay of colors: Should the orange go over the purple or the purple over the orange? What about the registration? The viscosity? The squeegee?

It’s a lot for visitors to take in, but help in the form of a short how-to video and illustrated brochure on the screenprinting process will be on-site. And those looking to give the process a try can check out the museum’s underground studio space where visitors can create their own works of art.

“This show has a large education component, and we’re tasked with showing the process,” White says. “It’s exciting to be able to geek out about printmaking.”

The Art of Making Art

Warhol did not invent screenprinting.

It had been around for centuries before he arrived on the scene. Still used to this day by the textile industry to transfer patterns onto clothing and wallpaper, it was also a handy editing tool for graphic designers before computers changed everything.

Warhol wasn’t even the first painter (the ’30s and ’40s saw many artists experimenting with what they called “serigraphs”) nor was he the only painter of his era to employ screenprinting (think Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, and Robert Rauschenberg).

But in Warhol’s hands, it became a means to many ends.

“The reason I’m painting this way is that I want to be a machine,” Warhol said in a 1963 interview with ARTnews, “and I feel that whatever I do and do machine-like is what I want to do.”

That same year, Warhol opened his inaugural Silver Factory in Midtown Manhattan, signaling an assembly-line approach to making art. The it-takes-a-village philosophy was nothing new for Warhol. Early in his career, he would host coloring parties at Serendipity 3 (he loved their signature Frrrozen Hot Chocolate), where friends and strangers alike would help him add color to his drawings.

“Warhol was always working in collaboration with other people,” White says. “Artists trust others with their vision all the time. I imagine most of Warhol’s paper prints were done by studios specializing in printmaking. To think he was in the studio as prints were being pulled probably didn’t happen.”

That doesn’t mean they weren’t made to his specifications, inconsistencies and all. Warhol called it “chancy”—the random variations that might occur from layer to layer, print to print.

“It would be the same image with slight differences,” Morgan explains. “Maybe the ink built up from using the screen over and over again, or maybe the registration was off. Warhol was excited about this random effect. He said it was ‘quick and chancy.’”

The relatively fast turnaround time from concept to finished product was another draw for Warhol. He figured out the math: More screenprints equaled more sales, and more sales added up to more funding for his other less lucrative projects.

“Who’s going to pay money to sit and watch Empire [his 1964 avant-garde art film] for eight hours?” Morgan asks. “He realized he could do both. He could support himself financially by making things people desired and then use that money to finance the things that were more experimental.”

And people wanted what he was selling—the movie-star portraits, the cows, the daisies, the banana. Maybe Warhol and the Pop art movement he advanced were actually—ironically—calling out society’s obsession with consumerism and celebrity.

“I like money on the wall,” Warhol once declared. “Say you were going to buy a $200,000 painting. I think you should take that money, tie it up, and hang it on the wall. Then when someone visited you, the first thing they would see is the money on the wall.”

Although the quote is a bit cynical for even Warhol, Taylor suggests that it fails to speak to the intrinsic beauty of art and our attraction to beautiful things. “I think Warhol was interested in money and business and what that meant for the status of art objects,” Taylor says. “But he was interested in all sorts of other things, too. And those things mingled and coexisted, making his work rich and complex and nuanced.”

“I like money on the wall. Say you were going to buy a $200,000 painting. I think you should take that money, tie it up, and hang it on the wall. Then when someone visited you, the first thing they would see is the money on the wall.”

 Andy Warhol

His print portfolios and editions were, at least during his lifetime, also accessible and affordable, bringing art to the people in a somewhat egalitarian way.

 “I don’t think he would have thought about it quite so philosophically as to call it democratic,” Morgan says. “But his family didn’t have a lot of money, didn’t always have things. Coming from that background, I think it made him feel good to see more people participating in art.”

Warhol would no doubt approve of his namesake museum’s plans to take Good Business: Andy Warhol’s Screenprints on the road.

According to Morgan, the show was developed in part to respond to requests from smaller regional museums and university galleries around the country looking for a traveling exhibition to rent. For these facilities, space (not too big) and money (not too expensive) are the primary concerns.

The Warhol answered the call.

“We’re excited to show it here first because of its specific focus and the education component,” Morgan says. “It also gives us the opportunity to work out all the details, prepare the text, share our ideas, and be better able to help guide venues through the show.”

The bottom line, she adds, is pretty straightforward: “We’re hoping to get these works in front of different audiences.”

In Warhol’s words: “Exposure and attention make a work famous—the more you talk about it, the more attention it gets, the more validity it achieves.”

Lead support for Good Business: Andy Warhol’s Screenprints is provided by Nathalie and Stan Doobin. Generous support is provided by Clifford and Diane Rowe, Brian Wongchaowart and Andi Irwin, Debbie and William S. Demchak, Ina and Lawrence N. Gumberg, and Christine J. Toretti. Additional support is provided by Michele Fabrizi.

Andy Warhol artwork © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.

The post Andy Warhol: The Product appeared first on Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh.

On March 31, Mario Rossero, who grew up south of Pittsburgh near Hickory, Pennsylvania (where his mother still lives), returns to The Andy Warhol Museum as its new director—28 years after his first stint there as an artist educator. He spent seven years in that part-time post while teaching art full time in the Shaler Area School District. The infectiously enthusiastic Rossero says he “loved being that creative champion for a school—not just the kids, but for the parents, too.” But he knew he had it in him to champion the cause on a bigger scale, even though, as he points out, “the last place a school system is looking for leadership is from the art teachers.” The self-professed “calculated risk-taker” would go on to spend weekends earning his Master of Science in education degree before happily disproving his own theory by not only becoming director of arts education for Chicago Public Schools but also eventually taking over as chief of all core curriculum. Having learned to work on a big scale, Rossero went even bigger when he was named senior vice president for education at Washington, D.C.’s Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, where he helped open the REACH, a new space where audiences of all ages and interests could come together with artists for less formal exploration. In January 2020, he was named executive director of the National Art Education Association (NAEA), the leading professional membership organization for visual arts, design, and media arts educators—another full-circle moment, as he’s been an NAEA member throughout his career. As he considers his new position, Rossero says he doesn’t need to go far for his inspiration: “If we’re really smart, we’ll constantly go back to Warhol as the touchstone.”

Q: How does it feel to be coming home to The Warhol?
A:  I couldn’t be more excited. I have a special place in my heart for The Warhol. It was a unique place to be for your first job out of college, but it was also a place that influenced my artwork and my education approach.

Q: What did you love about being an arts educator?   
A: When I was in the classroom, I got to make art every day with young people. I got to be the bright spot in their day—and, for many, the reason they came to school. I felt so fortunate. It’s one of the greatest experiences you could ever have.

Q: What’s one of your best memories as a teacher?
A: I was an arts educator in Chicago’s South Side, in Harold Washington Elementary, and I had 800 kids, 10 grade levels, and 7 classes a day. It was amazing!

Q: What makes Warhol, his art, and his museum such a great resource for teachers and students?
A: The older I get, the more I realize how prolific he was. Especially at the time that he was an artist, we didn’t see artists dabble in so many different media. You have to believe he had a true north to himself. He had a precognizant way about him—almost like he could predict the future. I just think he’s so relevant, and everyone has an in.

Q: Had you considered museum work before?
A: I had started to consider what it would be like to lead a brick-and-mortar institution. So much of my recent work was virtual and national, at a distance.  And I’m a people person; I like to have a community.  During my time in Chicago, especially, I felt I was part of the fabric and fiber of the city. So, I would think about it: leading a staff that’s really committed, being in the heart of a community and a city, contributing to the organization and beyond.

Q: Are you excited about the work of The Warhol’s Pop District?
A: It feels like it was tailor-made to my experiences across my career, especially the past 10 years. The Pop District helps The Warhol become even more Warhol. The community engagement, investing in youth, investing in Pittsburgh, investing in the next generation, all the design work. And then, uniquely, the performing arts space; I spent so much time working with artists, and authors, and playwrights, and production folks at the Kennedy Center, and I feel this new space could offer something really special and unique. 

Q: What do you think is the primary role of museums in education today?
A: Museums are a community hub, a community convener. They’re really this space where we can come together to imagine and be inspired and innovate. And we’re definitely seeing this evolution of a museum as even more of a community space.

We are more than just the art on our walls; we are a space that welcomes in our community to share and express ideas, and hopefully move those ideas forward.

The post Q+A: Mario Rossero appeared first on Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh.

But without intervention, the scientific phenomenon that created Oxidation may be its undoing. In 2020, staff at The Andy Warhol Museum discovered mysterious puddles below the painting and a new drip pattern on its surface. It was as if the chemical reaction that produced the artwork had been reactivated.

The conservator at The Warhol, in collaboration with mineralogists and forensic scientists, is searching for clues as to how to stop or even reverse Oxidation’s changes. Their work is documented in an exhibition on view through the end of 2024 called Altered States.

Ironically, none of this would surprise Warhol himself. In a 1985 interview with art historian Benjamin Buchloh, Warhol described how paintings in his Oxidation series melted under the hot lights when exhibited at the Paris Art Fair FIAC at the Grand Palais, even likening them to religious iconography.

“They never stopped dripping because the lights were so hot. Then you can understand why those holy pictures cry all the time—it must have something to do with the material they were painted on or something like that,” he remarked, seemingly unfazed.

While Warhol signaled his acquiescence to the painting’s degradation, that kind of change shouldn’t happen under The Warhol’s stewardship, says Rikke Foulke, associate conservator of paintings.

Photo: Bryan Conley

“If we continue to let Oxidation drip, we may not have a painting for the next generation,” she added.

The popularity of the painting, made by a man credited with declaring, “In the future, everybody will be world-famous for 15 minutes,” has connected with a younger generation of art lovers on apps like TikTok, the social media platform known for short-form videos. A 30-second TikTok video about Oxidation—which was produced by The Warhol—has garnered 63,000 likes and more than 700 comments.

What’s apparent in the TikTok discourse regarding Warhol’s artistic output and Oxidation touches on what has endeared his work for generations: Warhol challenges the very concept of what can be defined as art and who can consider himself an artist. 

“Why don’t they teach this stuff at school?” says one commenter. “I definitely would have become an artist.”

Groundbreaking Conservation

It was the summer of 2020 when staff members at The Warhol first saw the stains under Oxidation, a line of coffee-colored, circle-shaped drops and a larger splotch in the shape of West Virginia below the painting’s right corner. After they notified Amber Morgan, director of collections and exhibitions, she went over to the painting to see if there was a ceiling leak.

There wasn’t. 

Identifying the source of a problem with a piece of art is rarely that easy, Morgan says. For almost 25 years, she’s managed artworks at The Warhol and Carnegie Museum of Art and has seen her share of issues. 

“Generally, artists don’t think of preservation when creating work; they will make what they’re going to make,” she notes. 

Carnegie Museums staff are trained to handle collection-related emergencies and the initial steps are fairly straightforward, even if the ultimate solution is not. First, document the conditions of the affected artwork. Next, examine the rest of the collections for signs of damage or impending damage. Finally, determine the next steps to prevent future issues.

Many materials popular in modern artwork—not just artwork made with urine—suffer from an inherent vice: disintegration due to their inborn characteristics. 

“It can be infuriating as a museum person to think, ‘What is the future of this object?’” Morgan says. “One example:  Art made with newsprint is difficult to preserve because it is made of the cheapest pulp paper and becomes yellow and brittle when it ages. Art made with pantyhose, with rubber tires—it’s all going to deteriorate.” 

And therein lies the challenge for Foulke and her colleagues: How much of what’s happening to Oxidation is inherent vice? How can the painting’s degradation be slowed down, stopped, or even reversed? 

Photo: Bryan Conley

With a generous Bank of America Art Conservation Project grant, Foulke and her peers are performing groundbreaking research to uncover the answers. Visitors to Altered States can view the clues Foulke and her team are following in their quest to uncover the mysteries within Oxidation. On display are mock-up canvases created by Warhol staff, canisters of metallic flakes used by Warhol in his series, and sample minerals—on loan from Carnegie Museum of Natural History—that were used in the making of ancient pigments. 

“Altered States is a showcase of how conservation overlaps with art, history, chemistry, and minerals,” Foulke says.

Their findings will inform critical conservation work of The Warhol’s Oxidation series holdings and additional Oxidation paintings in public and private collections.

Foray into the Abstract

Warhol’s Oxidation series is a major departure from his groundbreaking Pop art screen prints. Those images, easily replicated and mass produced, spotlight the aesthetics of everyday objects and celebrity publicity shots. However, the paintings that make up the Oxidation series challenge viewers to take a closer look at a commonplace sight—oxidation is everywhere, from rust on car doors to the green fuzz on old pennies.

The paintings in the Oxidation series are Warhol’s first foray into abstract expressionism and are believed to be inspired by Jackson Pollock’s work—paintings resembling scribble-scrabble drips and splashes of paint. The places where urine blotched and mottled the canvas contain green, blue, and charcoal hues—vivid, large-scale rust spots made into art.

Warhol was an artist of high concept, even if his execution appeared simple. Creating paintings through chemical reactions takes dedicated study, intentionality, and experimentation. 

The work may appear random to an uninitiated viewer, but Warhol took great care when creating the Oxidation paintings, says Foulke.

In creating the paintings, Warhol and his assistants mixed together dry metallic powder with water and an acrylic binder. They then laid the canvases on the floor, coated them in copper paint, and urinated on them while the paint was still wet. The chemicals in the urine reacted with the metal substrate, producing oxides that create unique patterns.

Photo: Bryan Conley

Foulke notes that the people who contributed urine to the series—Warhol’s friends and associates—even adopted an experimental vitamin regime to determine whether the chemicals present in their urine could influence the colors that emerged when applied to the treated canvases.  

Longtime Warhol collaborator and Factory member Ronnie Cutrone mentioned the method in a 1998 interview with gallerist Daniel Blau.

“They [the paintings in the Oxidation series] are just scientific experiments. The first chemical was B complex, which we put into our urine,” he told Blau.

“Warhol pointed out that a person can’t just go and urinate on a canvas expecting the result to be interesting. A contributor must develop their skills for a successful composition,” says Foulke. “Warhol would view the results and cut up canvases into individual pieces to distinguish the most interesting parts,” she adds.

Cross-Disciplinary Analysis

To understand how and why Oxidation came to evolve more than 40 years after it was painted, Foulke started at the birth of the painting. Following Warhol’s protocol, she recreated the Oxidation series.

The Warhol Museum Archive is the most extensive collection of Warhol ephemera in existence—more than 8,000 cubic feet of material housing half a million objects, including notebooks, sculptures, audio tapes, and canisters of the metallic powder used in the Oxidation series, and scraps cut from the Oxidation canvases from when they were stretched onto frames.

The Warhol’s archive and recorded interviews with Warhol’s Factory assistant Ronnie Cutrone were integral to producing mock-ups of the Oxidation series. Using a recipe documented by Cutrone, Foulke mixed metallic powder with water and acrylic paint and applied it to several canvases. Then, using a pipette, Foulke applied urine donated by The Warhol’s staff to the canvas. 

The mock-ups and scraps were delivered to two of The Warhol’s partners for analysis: Carnegie Museum of Natural History and RJ Lee Group, an industrial forensics analytical laboratory and scientific consulting firm.

Foulke tapped Travis Olds, assistant curator of minerals at the Museum of Natural History, to learn about the mineral-based pigments in Oxidation. Warhol was hardly the first artist to use urine in the composition of an artwork. Notably, Pliny the Elder, a first century A.D. scholar interested in minerals, recorded a recipe for verdigris, a blueish-green pigment using copper and urine. 

“So many materials, like the paint and the metal that goes into art, are mineral-derived; a mineralogist can lend insight into the history of an artwork,” Olds explains.

Stewardship of The Warhol’s collection has long benefited from the experts of the Museum of Natural History, including entomologists who support The Warhol’s integrated pest management program and taxidermists who help maintain and preserve the stuffed lion and stuffed dog, Cecil, in the museum’s collection.

“Working with artists and conservators that think and approach problems differently than me is fun,” says Olds. “They bring a new perspective, and we make a great team to try and fix them.” 

During his tenure at the Museum of Natural History, Olds has consulted on multiple art conservation projects, including the impact of fingerprints on Meg Webster’s sculpture, Nose Cone, a stainless steel conic cylinder at Carnegie Museum of Art. He has also helped recreate an ancient pigment whose recipe was believed to have been lost to history—the vibrant “Egyptian blue.”

“As a mineralogist, I characterize materials,” Olds explains. “I want to understand what’s in them, what atoms are there, how much of each atom, and then how they’re arranged. Once you know that, you know so much about the material.”

With Oxidation, Olds used a scanning electron microscope to capture an image of the paint 100 microns in size, about the width of the strand of hair. Electron microscopy is a unique type of microscopy in that it uses electrons to look at the surfaces of objects and their composition.

He wanted to know more about the composition of the paint and, to use an unscientific word, the “goo” that formed on the canvas when it dripped. Olds describes the goo as the “organic junk left after the urine degraded and mingled.”

He found that the samples contained a medley of elements, including copper, potassium, carbon, oxygen, chlorine, and sodium. 

“When I see things like sodium, potassium, and chlorine in a sample, my mind goes to salt. And, of course, urine has a large salt content,” says Olds. 

For Olds, the presence of salt is a red flag to understanding why Oxidation began deteriorating—some salts like to absorb water from the air. As for the goo, it contains copper, but it needs further analysis to determine its other components, he says.

Unlocking Mysteries

Another clue to unlocking the transformation of Oxidation lies in The Warhol’s HVAC data. In the days before the drips were discovered below the painting, the HVAC system suffered a mechanical failure that caused it to go offline for a few hours. The museum’s climate dramatically changed, creating what Foulke describes as a perfect storm: The humidity and temperature in the gallery rose; when the climate control system returned online, the air cooled and released moisture, triggering Oxidation’s chemical reaction.

The forensic scientists behind RJ Lee Group, whose labs are in Monroeville, Pennsylvania, have extensive experience recreating atmospheric conditions. The company consults for a diverse clientele, from casino owners concerned about the integrity of their keno balls to manufacturers who want to understand why their product unexpectedly broke.

One avenue of analysis they’re pursuing to learn about the changes exhibited by Oxidation is subjecting the scraps and mock-ups to an accelerated aging process. They can recreate the temperature and humidity conditions in the gallery the day the HVAC system went offline and even process the samples to see how 50 years of aging will impact the painting.

To do this, the scientists place specimens in an aging chamber resembling a large refrigerator with racks inside, and then subject them to atmospheric extremes that alter the chamber’s temperature and moisture level.

“If we continue to let Oxidation drip, we may not have a painting for the next generation.“

Rikke Foulke, The Warhol’s associate conservator of paintings

Scientists also attempt to understand the chemistry that created Oxidation’s colors.

“We’re talking about chemical reactions that are not really controlled,” says Chris Hefferan, an applied physicist and consulting scientist. “Warhol and his associates knew that if brass met urine, it would create a color effect. But there are subtleties in the colors resulting from a spectrum of compounds present in the artwork. We weren’t expecting that. 

“I think the complexity of it has been the most surprising on my end; we’re still kind of feeling our way through it. There are continuous variables to consider,” he adds.

In the coming months, the RJ Lee team plans to analyze cross sections of the samples—that is, the thinnest edge of the samples. In theory, this approach will help them better analyze the paint material separate from the canvas.

“We think that by viewing a cross section, we’ll see the salts on top of the colors produced by the urine separate  from the acrylic-metallic paint layer,” says Hefferan.

“If I were to analyze a Rembrandt or Picasso, I would be working with pigments based upon a specific set of minerals; we know what we expect to see in the red paint on those artists’ paintings,” Hefferan adds. “With Oxidation, we’re still trying to understand the chemistry that creates the colors. Once we understand the chemical reactions behind those pigments, we can use that characterization to understand what might happen in other circumstances.”

It’s unclear how much longer this work will take. The results from RJ Lee could lead to other avenues for investigation, Morgan notes. Regardless of how long it takes, she and Foulke hope this research is useful for conserving Oxidation paintings in other collections.

Foulke also recognizes an inherent contradiction in conserving Oxidation. As stewards of the collection, The Warhol needs to make sure the paintings are around for generations to come. But they also need to honor the artist’s intention.

“I’m not sure if there is a treatment we can do [to prevent further changes]. I’m not sure that there is a treatment we want to do,” Foulke says. “[Warhol] accepted this as change. And I can accept damage to some extent, but I don’t want the painting to—to use his words—melt away before our eyes.” 

Funding for the conservation of this artwork was generously provided through a grant from the Bank of America Art Conservation Project.  

The post Living Artwork appeared first on Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh.

It carries the signifiers of a children’s cartoon character while emoting more somber human feelings: Is it the acquiescence of total relief or utter hopelessness? Perhaps COMPANION’s not even resting, but dead—like the person in the images next to it, in Andy Warhol’s Ambulance Disaster. Hung on the wall above COMPANION, Ambulance Disaster is made of two nearly identical pictures, from photographs of a 1960 automobile accident—a dead body, thrown halfway over the window of a crumpled ambulance.

The sculpture COMPANION 2020 by the artist Brian Donnelly, better known as KAWS, and this definitive piece from Warhol’s 1960s Death and Disaster series seem like grim outliers from two artists better known for bright colors and pop-culture inspiration. But as The Warhol’s 30th anniversary exhibition KAWS + Warhol aims to show by bringing these two iconic artists together for the first time, there is another side to each of them—a darker side.

Warhol and KAWS are both often misinterpreted because they use pop culture and bright colors; because young people are attracted to the work. People think their work is light, or even superficial, and I think that’s far, far from the truth.  

–Patrick Moore, Former director of The Andy Warhol Museum

KAWS and Warhol have a lot in common, despite being generations apart. Like Warhol, KAWS continually breaks down the barrier between art and commerce, equally adept at exhibiting in major international galleries and selling T-shirts and figurines featuring COMPANION and similar characters. KAWS started his career in New York City as a graffiti artist, just like Warhol’s young friends Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. And KAWS’ collaborations, such as the one with General Mills to make mass-produced cereal boxes, takes the Campbell’s soup-can aesthetic one step further—moving KAWS’ artwork outside gallery spaces and onto supermarket shelves.

But that’s not the only common thread connecting the two.

“Warhol and KAWS are both often misinterpreted because they use pop culture and bright colors; because young people are attracted to the work,” says Patrick Moore, former director of The Andy Warhol Museum, who was the curator of KAWS + Warhol. “People think their work is light, or even superficial, and I think that’s far, far from the truth.”

KAWS + Warhol shows these two artists not as pop phenomena or brothers-in-mass-market, but as subtler voices for the anxious. Not as celebrity-beloved trendsetters—though they are—but as observers of a generation that simply has seen too much and would so love to briefly close its eyes.

Pop Icons, Misunderstood

“I’ve always gravitated to Andy Warhol,” KAWS says from his studio in Brooklyn, New York. “When you’re young, you tiptoe into artists, and, aside from Van Gogh and the artists schools push on you as a child, it’s Warhol who’s one of those that really hits you first. He has such a free, open mind to different media and to occupying spaces—he opened a lot of doors for my generation, and for artists like [Keith] Haring, who in turn opened doors for me.”

Warhol’s silkscreens and Haring’s dancing, twisting figures have become fully integrated parts of Western culture—not just artworks, but also some kind of pop folk-culture that can be found on T-shirts in Urban Outfitters and television commercials aired during the Super Bowl. It’s the same with KAWS’ artworks, designs, and toys, so ubiquitous from New York to Tokyo that they’ve grown far beyond their creator.

Born in New Jersey in 1974, KAWS moved to New York City in the 1990s, working in commercial illustration and animation as well as his sideline in illegal street art. His early day-job work on animated TV shows (such as 101 Dalmatians, Daria, and Doug) and his graffiti bled together into a kind of artistic gumbo that evokes Disney and The Simpsons, Michelin Man and Bugs Bunny. Eventually, a recognizable form came into being: a series of characters—COMPANION, BENDY, ACCOMPLICE—that are part-humanoid, part-cartoon, with X’s for eyes like dead comic-book drawings. The ever-repeatable images in his paintings and sculptures, album covers and toys are manna to a global, digital generation for whom images matter perhaps more than they do to baby boomers or even Generation X.

Just as Warhol was initially derided for his Campbell’s Soup Cans, KAWS’ exhibitions are sometimes met poorly by parts of the art world. But neither artist makes work that is simply a shallow celebration of capital, which mass media and advertising might imply. To Moore, Warhol and KAWS both convey far deeper sentiments; sentiments often bathed in the darkness of anxious times.

“We live in a world of images—more than even Warhol could have imagined,” says Moore. “But these two artists are very aware of the dark side of image culture—where you’re looking at things but not really seeing them. They’re offering up images that are candy-colored, and that have popular-culture resonance for us, but then have a secondary meaning that’s more critical.”

To this end, KAWS + Warhol includes some of the most familiar images in each artist’s canon, available for reinterpretation. For example, the pairing of Warhol’s film Blow Job with KAWS’ sculpture of COMPANION or KAWSBOB (a kind of Spongebob Squarepants with KAWS’ signature X’d-out eyes) emphasizes the grotesque side of Warhol’s work. In this context, Blow Job star DeVeren Bookwalter suddenly appears death-like, eyes drooping, practically forming X’s.

Works from Warhol’s Death and Disaster series, such as the ambulance paintings and silkscreens of an electric chair, are juxtaposed with sculptures of COMPANION such as GONE, in which the figure carries the broken body of a KAWS-style character like Grover or Elmo from Sesame Street.

Marianne Dobner is curator at Mumok, the Museum of Modern Art in Vienna, Austria, who has written on and curated exhibitions of Warhol, and who contributed an essay on KAWS and Warhol to this exhibition’s catalog. To Dobner, there is a key artistic category that ties the two men together: “the cute.”

“The cute means it’s something very easy to connect to, and yet if you keep digging, there’s something that criticizes society as a whole,” says Dobner. “Look at the Death and Disaster series, the electric chairs and accidents [from 1960s America]. COMPANION feels like we’re in a similar moment now—like there’s so much going on we can’t even find a proper way to talk about it.”

Consider how both artists render dark subject matter such as skulls, Moore says. 

“It’s the mark of a great artist that they take a subject that’s actually quite morbid, but through color and shape and form they turn it into something irresistible.”

Fun With Cereal

When presented in context, Warhol’s influence on KAWS becomes more apparent. And that inspiration isn’t just skulls and colors; it’s as much about Warhol’s approach as any of the artist’s actual pieces. Part of that is a passion for exploring different ways to make art, regardless of the medium.

“With Andy, if he’s working on film, that’s what he’s doing—he’s a filmmaker,” says KAWS. “If he’s doing an advertisement, that’s just part of his practice. And I think he’d just expect people to, you know, catch up!”

This includes collaborations with musicians. Warhol managed The Velvet Underground & Nico, the seminal 1960s proto-punk album for which he made the famed “banana” cover art. KAWS has 808s & Heartbreak, Kanye West’s game-changing 2008 hip-hop album, for which he designed images bursting with colors and typically KAWS-bendy icons. And while Warhol made renowned ads for magazines and the fashion industry in the 1950s, KAWS’ collaborations with Japanese fashion brand UNIQLO and Disney have turned the 21st century into a world of X’d-out eyes. Their album covers and ads may not be featured in KAWS + Warhol, but there are other ways in which Warhol’s ad-obsessed work and KAWS come into play.

One example includes new works that KAWS will debut in The Warhol’s 30th anniversary exhibition—a series of large-scale paintings of cereal boxes. In 2022, KAWS worked with General Mills to make new KAWS versions of their beloved monster-themed cereal boxes such as Franken Berry and Count Chocula, which are well known to anyone who grew up in the Saturday morning cartoon era. (KAWS was such a fan that, when approached to collaborate on a different cereal for GM, he immediately asked about the monster cereals.) Limited-edition cereal boxes sold in stores with the pink Frankenstein-esque Franken Berry, for example, showed the character with COMPANION-styled skull-and-crossbones head and X’d eyes. Now KAWS has painstakingly reproduced those designs as wall-sized paintings.

Photo: Joshua Franzos

“They’ve been on the wall for months,” he says. “It seems so straightforward—reverse engineering what I did for the cereal box. But those are ink drawings scanned into the computer, and now here I’m hand painting all these little lines which, at an 8-inch-by-10-inch scale is just a crosshatch with a pen and takes minutes. So this is months of just redrawing all of that—paying attention to the line weight. It’s fun. It’s therapeutic.”

Part of the project included plastic toys like the ones cereal boxes contained in his childhood. And as part of the exhibition, KAWS has recreated those toys as bronze sculptures, similar to the painting approach.

“Warhol was, obviously, very interested in this kind of work,” says Moore. “KAWS has taken that to a whole other level. You could walk into any grocery store and buy those KAWS cereal boxes, and now, to walk it back into a fine art context with these paintings and sculptures—it becomes like a hall of mirrors between things that are unabashedly commercial and those which are part of the highest level of the art world.”

A Fruitful Pairing

To celebrate The Warhol turning 30 years old, it seems appropriate to do what the museum’s namesake might’ve done and bring together his work with that of the  new generation.

The comparisons between Warhol and KAWS are so fruitful—whether it’s their more apparent interests in ignoring tradi- tional boundaries, or the dark “cute”-ness that Moore and Dobner find so compelling. The exhibition also creates a juxtaposition that could be seen as a collaboration between the two artists, their works shining new light on one another that gives rise to new interpretations—and new audiences.

“KAWS has an incredible drawing power with younger viewers,” says Moore. “When Warhol was in the last years of his life, he connected with and made collaborative works with Basquiat and Haring, and he got the idea that to remain relevant, I need a relationship with younger artists who will inspire me, and who I can bring attention to. That’s a strategy baked into Warhol’s life. He wanted to remain relevant, and one way to do that was to work with younger artists.”

Included in the exhibition is a painting called TIDE, which shows COMPANION barely floating—or perhaps not; perhaps sinking—in a moon-lit ocean, no shore in sight. The depth of color, the significance of the moon and its swathe of light across the water, the stillness of this image is comforting despite its potentially unsettling message. Similar to some of Warhol’s silkscreen portraits, COMPANION is like a jolly death mask of celebrity.

My work is very personal. I don’t approach it trying to create dark undertones. I feel like there are just a lot of reactions to the environment in my life, and these are attempts to create things from those reactions that are inviting and have empathy.

–KAWS

“To have these two big figures of the art world talking to each other—it almost feels like propelling Warhol into today,” says Dobner. “For me, those COMPANION figures feel almost like an avatar for myself, just like the Death and Disaster works were decades ago. It’s like me staring at the news—that feeling that we need to do something, and not knowing what we could do.”

What might be seen as an uncanny ability to give the audience its avatar could simply be something KAWS and Warhol exude: respect for the viewer. Neither one feels the need to tell the viewer what they’re seeing.

“My work is very personal,” says KAWS. “I don’t approach it trying to create dark undertones. I feel like there are just a lot of reactions to the environment in my life, and these are attempts to create things from those reactions that are inviting and have empathy.

“The work Andy created is a lot more guarded; cooler. With the work that I make, it’s myself. There’s no façade. I’m just a person making work.”

KAWS + Warhol is presented by Uniqlo. Lead support is provided by Nemacolin. Generous support is provided by Jim Spencer and Michael Lin, and Kathe and Jim Patrinos. Additional support is provided by Carnegie Corporation of New York, and Steven and Lynda Latner. The Warhol’s exhibition program is made possible in part through support provided by the Curatorial Vision Fund. Contributors include Scott M. Mory, and Cris and Cindy Turner.

The post Pop Companions appeared first on Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh.

The surnames carved into the grave markers that sprout from the hillside of Bethel Park’s St. John the Baptist Byzantine Catholic Cemetery trend toward Eastern European. Pachuta. Benedik. Mihalik. Zolock. Slota. And then, a few feet in front of a companion grave marker for Slovakian immigrants Andrew and Julia Warhola is the burial site for their world-famous son, Andy Warhol, where he was laid to rest on February 26, 1987, just a few days after his death from complications following gallbladder surgery. Its modesty stands in striking contrast to his larger-than-life public persona as a consummate New Yorker. Curiously, the grave is not even terribly close to his childhood home in Pittsburgh’s Oakland neighborhood, a half-hour drive away. The reason for this humble suburban final resting place for Andy and his parents is rooted in their Byzantine Catholic faith. The cemetery is owned and operated by St. John the Baptist Church in Pittsburgh, a sister parish of St. John Chrysostom Byzantine Catholic Church, Warhol’s childhood church in Greenfield. 

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Grace Marston wants to be the preeminent Andy Warhol scholar of her generation. A 32-year-old Pittsburgh native, Marston first dove into Warhol’s work as a middle school student in Maryland. Years later, while taking a break from college in 2011, she returned to Pittsburgh and pursued her interest in the late Pop icon by taking a job as a gallery attendant at The Andy Warhol Museum, where she continues to share her expertise as an arts educator by teaching courses, presenting lectures, and giving tours. Marston, who expects to graduate from the University of Pittsburgh this year with a bachelor’s degree in History of Art and Architecture, says she wants to show others how Warhol’s art can connect some of the most complex topics and social movements in history. 

Q: How did you get interested in Warhol?

A: In seventh grade, I wrote a research paper and made a documentary video about Warhol. I was born in Pittsburgh, but I was living in Maryland at the time, so I partially chose the topic as an excuse to come to Pittsburgh to visit the museum. I did research in the basement of The Warhol, and now I help middle schoolers with their research projects, so it’s come full circle! 

Q: What about Warhol makes you feel so connected with his work?   

A: Warhol is a gateway to all these different avenues of research and learning. It’s not just about Warhol, but about how he intersects with all these different topics. I love researching the Iranian Revolution, for example, or the political situation in Italy in the ‘70s that led to Warhol’s Hammer and Sickle paintings. I have far-left politics myself, but I’m interested in this artist who’s so associated with capitalism and American consumerism. With my thesis, I’m exploring this question of the ways in which a socialist can enjoy Andy Warhol. 

Q: So, how does a socialist enjoy Warhol? 

A: You can interpret his ’60s Pop paintings as critiques of capitalism. The fact that wealthy capitalists bought them showed that he was telling a joke that they weren’t quite in on. Then, in the ’70s, when he started taking on more blatantly communist themes like Chairman Mao or the hammers and sickles, it reflects that communism became easier to find during the détente era, since he could take those subjects on without worrying about persecution. We can enjoy this irony that Warhol was playing with. 

Q: How do you make Warhol relevant today? 

A: I don’t think it’s that challenging. He’s painted celebrities that are still famous today and predicted a lot of qualities of consumerism, fame, and celebrity culture. In late 2015, after Donald Trump announced his presidential run, I checked Andy Warhol’s diaries for encounters between Andy Warhol and Donald Trump and uncovered this story where Trump commissioned Warhol to do paintings of Trump Tower and then he didn’t end up buying any of the paintings because he didn’t like the colors Warhol used. Warhol was really mad and was talking smack about Trump in the diaries. It was really funny. I did a blog post about that, and it got picked up by a bunch of major news publications including CNN and The New York Times. It was cool to see so many people respond to that story.

Q: What are some of your favorite things you’ve experienced at the museum? 

A: One cool thing I’ve done is an initiative for more queer programming. I’ve done a lot of research on Warhol’s boyfriends and the different ways that his boyfriends would show up in his artwork and impacted his career. I helped develop this curriculum that then became the Dandy Andy Tour, which is all about investigating the queer themes in his art. That’s been really rewarding.

Q: Could you tell us a little bit about the “Collection Close-Ups” you do? 

A: A lot of other arts educators have been making videos about Warhol’s studio practice. I’m definitely more interested in art history and storytelling, so I thought I should make a different type of video. I’ve only done one so far, about the elephant painted by Keith Haring that you see on the fourth floor right now. It had a first life as part of the Met Costume Institute, and then a second half life as an unfinished artwork by Basquiat and Victor Hugo, then Keith Haring brought it into its final form. You wouldn’t know that from just looking at the elephant. I thought that was a good story to start off the Collection Close-Up initiative.

Q: Do you ever think about what Warhol would think about the museum? 

A: His first question would probably be why it was in Pittsburgh, but he has no idea how much Pittsburgh has changed. I would hope he would be proud of what Pittsburgh has become.

The post Q+A: Grace Marston appeared first on Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh.

It’s a scene that evokes the city’s industrial past, offers a snapshot of the present, and, for the people gathered at The Pop District headquarters one recent Saturday afternoon, includes a future full of possibilities.

In May 2023, the state of Pennsylvania licensed Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh to launch its first-ever diploma program—a digital marketing program based in The Pop District. The Warhol welcomed the inaugural diploma class in June, which means that students who are scheduled to complete the 24-week program this December will earn a diploma signed, sealed, and ready for touting on resumes and hanging on office walls.

According to Ryan Haggerty, who oversees the new diploma program, Pittsburgh’s shift to a more creative economy is the driving force behind the initiative.

“We’re offering accessible programming that speaks to what is in demand, what employers are looking for,” Haggerty says. “But we’re also working with each individual to help them achieve their personal goals.

“We’re going to see what comes out of this, where our students take it next, and how that will impact Pittsburgh.”

“We’re offering accessible programming that speaks to what is in demand, what employers are looking for. But we’re also working with each individual to help them achieve their personal goals.”

–Ryan Haggerty

The brainchild of The Warhol, The Pop District—a multidimensional project designed to transform Pittsburgh’s eastern North Shore neighborhood into a cultural, educational, and economic juggernaut, with The Warhol as its anchor—officially launched in 2022.

One of its flagship initiatives was a youth-focused workforce development component that teaches skills needed to participate in the creative digital economy. The digital marketing diploma program is an important part of that.

“Being able to say that we are state-licensed to provide a diploma program carries weight,” Haggerty says. “Employers see value in it because it tells them that our participants went through a program, and they were dedicated to it and completed it.”

According to Maddi Love, one of the program’s primary instructors, gaining state approval is no small feat. “It’s a long, arduous process,” she says. “There’s a lot of scrutiny from the Department of Education. They ask a lot of specific questions about how this course will be helpful for people, and you have to have direct answers.”

With 15 years of professional digital marketing experience, Love developed a strong, forward-looking curriculum.

“I care about giving people the skills to work in the digital realm effectively,” she says. “I’m no guru, but I’ve seen the ways people do it wrong and get complacent. All of the programs and platforms we’re talking about today are going to change in six months. For us, it’s about teaching people to teach themselves so that they are able to understand the fundamental aspects of the technology.”

“I look at the folks in this program as people who understand new ideas and new ways of building marketing departments or getting a product out. So, yes, I would definitely be inclined to take a deeper look at someone who has graduated from the diploma program.”

–Christian Lockerman, executive producer of The Warhol Creative

As someone who is in the unique position of being a Pop District insider as well as a potential employer, Christian Lockerman appreciates the long-term, big-picture perspective.

“I look at the folks in this program as people who understand new ideas and new ways of building marketing departments or getting a product out,” says Lockerman, the executive producer of The Warhol Creative, The Pop District’s in-house digital media production studio that offers on-the-job training to young, and not-so-young, creators. “So, yes, I would definitely be inclined to take a deeper look at someone who has graduated from the diploma program.”

Before there was Internet

 At first glance, the 12 people huddled around their laptops at a conference table seem to have little in common. There’s a range of ages (from 20s to 50-plus), races, ethnicities, and tattoos.

But once the conversation turns from casual chatter to intense talk of Scrum (a project management system), HubSpot (a CRM, or customer relationship management platform), and SEO (search engine optimization), they settle in on a shared goal: learning the fundamentals of online marketing.

Meeting virtually for two hours on Tuesday and Thursday evenings and for four hours in person on Saturdays, the digital marketing class offers hands-on training in 21st century skills. And it’s free, at least for now.

“Normally, the program would be $8,000 [per student],” Haggerty says. “But because we’re fully subsidized by a mix of philanthropic funding and corporate sponsorships, people are able to come in and take this at no cost.”

The application process involves more than just a willingness to learn, although that is an important factor. Up to 20 openings are available for each cohort (the next one starts in February 2024), and application standards such as a logic test, writing sample, and video intro are part of the package.

“We want people to be able to demonstrate some basic digital literacy skills so that they can truly participate and benefit from the program,” Haggerty says. “But, really, what we’re looking for above all else is for people to express that this is going to be valuable to them, and how it’s going to help them achieve their goals.”

Taking his seat at the table, Christian Groblewski says his goals are pretty clear: He wants to reopen his music shop SuperMonkey. As a single 50-year-old parent and mid-career professional, the early days of COVID forced him to make some tough decisions, like shuttering his physical store and taking a more traditional job in school admissions.

Deeply steeped in the music industry (he’s a performer, promoter, and seller of merchandise), he’s continued to operate his company entirely online. Now, he’s ready to reopen SuperMonkey at a yet-to-be-determined location.

“I felt the big thing I lacked as a business owner was a good understanding of digital marketing,” Groblewski says. “Back when I went to school, we didn’t even have internet.

“Sometimes in this class I feel like the Karate Kid at the beginning of the movie, when he’s just painting the fence and wondering what’s happening. I’m waiting for that aha moment, too,” he continues. “But other times, I take what I’ve learned and I’m able to apply it immediately.”

Pointing to his computer screen, he asks, “See this https: address? Mine didn’t have an ‘s’. Do you know what that means? I didn’t.” [The “s” means all communications are encrypted, adding a level of security.] “I built this website 10 years ago, and all that time my site hasn’t been secure, and my Google ranking has suffered as a result.”

It turned out to be a quick fix, one of many changes he’s hoping to implement as he prepares to go on the offensive. “By the end of this program,” Groblewski says, “I want to be ready to attack the digital market.”

The proprietor of SuperMonkey is certainly not alone in his quest to conquer the digital universe.

According to Haggerty, Carnegie Museums’ digital marketing diploma program at The Warhol,  as well as the unlicensed classes offered by a sister program, called The Warhol Academy (also overseen by The Pop District), tend to attract local business owners like Groblewski, staff from small charitable organizations, aspiring entrepreneurs, people looking to get the most out of a side gig, and career changers looking to take on new roles in digital marketing.

Haggerty says the bottom line is this: “It doesn’t matter if you’re a for-profit, a nonprofit, the UPMCs of the world, or a startup; everybody needs to have an online presence. If you’re not online, you don’t exist.”

 That’s a reality COVID made stark. And that’s why Love set out to focus on all the essential, albeit frustrating, parts of digital marketing; and there are a lot.

Learning the Nitty-Gritty

“It happens all the time,” Love says. “A marketing department can’t change or edit the back end of a website because they don’t know how or they’ve been locked out. Now they have to call IT and jump through a million hoops. That’s why we teach web [development] skills.”

Other core competencies on the list include how to write Google ads, run a Mailchimp campaign, and analyze the analytics.

“There are a lot of people out there who talk about how to make great content,” Love continues. “We show you how to take C+ content—not A+—and share it with actual engagement from real people who have an interest in what you’re doing.”

“You become part of a peer group. You have people you can talk to and collaborate with, and you have people who will hold you accountable.”

–Ryan Haggerty

Still, the measure of success is as unique as a domain name.

Fionah Lynch, a recent University of Pittsburgh graduate, is taking the long view. Armed with a degree in digital media and professional communications, she landed a position at a local commercial real estate firm.

Like most first jobs, it’s not exactly the dream. “I do administrative work and some marketing,” she says, “but it’s a small company and they’re not looking to expand.”

Lynch, however, is looking to expand and grow her career, and sees this class as a means to that end. “This is a very big time commitment, more than I expected,” she says. “But I’m hoping to get hands-on experience with all these industry-standard programs. In college, we didn’t spend a lot of time doing the nitty-gritty stuff. It was much more conceptual.”

For now, her future promises resume updates reflecting her newfound digital marketing skills and state-licensed diploma.

But there are some benefits to taking this class that don’t fit neatly on a resume. Ironically, we’re talking about human interaction.

“Our instructors are working professionals, and they bring their experiences and up-to-date knowledge directly into the classroom where our students can ask questions and apply that information directly to their own projects,” Haggerty says.

“As much as we like being online,” he adds, “people do want to talk to other people.”

And keep talking, even after the course ends. Gaining contacts, making connections—it’s an old-school concept that still has a place even in this digital frontier.

“There’s a giant network here,” Haggerty says. “In addition to The Warhol, there are the other Carnegie Museums, there are our teachers and our staff, and we’re all here to help amplify whatever you’re working on.”

Lockerman puts it this way: “There’s some pull, some cachet associated with the name ‘Warhol,’ and that can help open doors.”

Haggerty also views each cohort as its own ecosystem of burgeoning influence and support. “You become part of a peer group,” he says. “You have people you can talk to and collaborate with, and you have people who will hold you accountable.”

Wanted: Lifetime Learners

 Meanwhile, just across the hall, The Warhol Academy’s digital marketing training class—which is not part of the diploma program—is nearing the end of its six-month semester. This class has a greater focus on people currently employed or running a business, rather than job seekers or freelance workers, but for the same no-fee tuition.

 “This class served as a model for our diploma option, which we launched just a few months later,” Haggerty says. “It not only gave us an opportunity to gauge everyone’s commitment and ability to come to the North Shore on Saturdays, it also showed that people are hungry to learn these skills, forge new relationships, and take their jobs to the next level.”

That’s what Sabrina Clark and Shyvonne Hall had in mind when they signed up. Clark, 52, works at a local nonprofit agency and built her own fashion consulting website, and Hall, 43, cultivated her own business as a YouTube design influencer with more than 105,000 subscribers.

The two arrived as strangers and now are collaborators and cheerleaders for each other’s success. They’re teaming up to tackle today’s assignment: Create 30 Google ads and 300 keywords, link the ads to a specific site or channel, and then explore the back end to determine the number of clicks, views, or purchases.

The results of this in-class task have real-world implications.

A self-described lifetime learner, Hall decided to enroll “to learn all the things about digital marketing I never even thought about before.”

Clark was just as curious, but perhaps a little bit more cautious. “I’m a woman of a particular age,” she says, “and it seemed like other classes and opportunities were just for younger people. But this class has no age limit.”

The results, Clark adds, seem limitless as well.

And that’s what The Pop District is counting on as its team hopes to make Pittsburgh a creative economy hub.

According to Lockerman, “We’ve adopted this uncopyrighted mantra that says we really want the next Andy Warhol to become the next Andy Warhol without having to leave the city.”

Haggerty offers his own variation of the mantra.

“I would hope that Andy would see this as  an opportunity for more artists, more creatives, more changemakers, and more people just doing their own thing being able to make it happen here in Pittsburgh.” 

THE POP DISTRICT is generously supported by: The Richard King Mellon Foundation, The Henry L. Hillman Foundation, PPG Foundation, and Dell Technologies.

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Who: Peter and Kristina Gerszten 

What They support: The Andy Warhol Museum   

Why it matters:
“We feel like when we go to The Warhol that we’re part of The Warhol. It’s not like we’re going to a stranger’s house, but we’re going to visit our own family.”  –Peter Gerszten

There’s a concept in Judaism called “tikkun olam” that has long resonated with Kristina   and Peter Gerszten.

Translated from Hebrew, it means “repairing  the world.” One way of doing that is by supporting the institutions that make a place culturally vibrant and rich.

“We very much value the arts and we realize that what’s offered to us in Pittsburgh is only really here because of philanthropy,” says Kristina.  “We’ve tried to teach our children that, and we try to practice what we teach.”

Their children, Jacob and Marcella, absorbed those lessons and began acting on them at a young age. When he was 9 years old, Jacob donated his life’s savings—$300—to Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, and as a high school student Marcella volunteered at The Andy Warhol Museum.

The family has long supported Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh as members. But they’ve focused their additional philanthropy on The Warhol through the Gerszten Family Fund, which provides unrestricted operating support for the museum. The reason was simple: It was a cherished place for their family and seemed like it could use the help.

“They don’t have all the resources that the main art museum has,” Kristina says. “So we feel like every penny we can give them would be beneficial.”

But the Gersztens also have a deep appreciation for what the museum and its namesake mean to the city of Pittsburgh.

The Warhol is an essential stop for friends or colleagues visiting from out of town. Peter, a professor of neurosurgery at the University of Pittsburgh, recently brought a group of international graduate students to the museum. And the artist’s Pittsburgh roots even came up on a recent conference call with doctors in Australia.

“Pittsburgh is not high on their list of places to visit, but they all know Andy Warhol and said, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s right. He’s from Pittsburgh,’” Peter says. “Andy Warhol is known the world over.”

Visiting and volunteering there was also a formative experience for Jacob and Marcella, who are both adults in their 20s now.

Jacob says The Warhol opened his eyes to the world around him and “played a huge role in helping me grow up in Pittsburgh.”

“From my first memories playing with the balloons on a kindergarten field trip to learning about other artists such as Basquiat, I have always enjoyed a trip to The Warhol, and I try to visit every time I come back to Pittsburgh,” he says.

Marcella describes The Warhol—indeed, all the Carnegie Museums—as her “haven of joy,” which continues to ignite her imagination.

“Here, memories twirl with art, and love grows with every visit,” she says.

Their childhood experiences counter a misconception that Kristina says many people seem to have about The Warhol—that it’s not a place for young kids. But The Warhol has an impressive slate of youth programming—like printmaking workshops, the basement “Factory” arts area, interactive exhibits—that often gets overlooked.

“It doesn’t have the association of being a kid-friendly museum,” she says. “But they have done an outstanding job of making it really very family-friendly.”

The Gersztens are also impressed by how The Warhol’s Pop District initiative is taking an innovative approach to engaging with the community. Its youth-focused workforce development program, public art initiative, and newly launched digital marketing diploma program demonstrate how the museum is finding new ways of engaging with and developing the next generation of community leaders.

Kristina points out that Pittsburgh is a city that has benefited from the largess of philanthropists like Andrew Carnegie, Henry Phipps Jr., and Richard King Mellon, names carved into cultural institutions around the city. But economic volatility during the financial crisis 15 years ago and, more recently, the COVID-19 lockdowns convinced museums that they needed to complement philanthropic support with other sources of revenue. And so initiatives being pioneered at The Warhol that help museums evolve their relationship with surrounding communities and develop other systems of support are essential.

“I think The Warhol expanding out into the community like that and engaging even more people is only a good thing,” Kristina says.

Individual donations will remain a critical source of support, and the Gersztens insist that they will continue to give. More than just feeling like it is their responsibility, their contributions to The Warhol deepen their relationship with the museum.

“It just makes it a little bit more special,” Peter says. “We feel like when we go to The Warhol that we’re part of The Warhol. It’s not like we’re going  to a stranger’s house, but we’re going to visit our  own family.”

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