A New CFO for Carnegie Museums

“I’ve been visiting the museums all my life, and I still feel the awe that the four Carnegie Museums inspire on every visit,” says Beth Wright, the new Vice President, Treasurer, and Chief Financial Officer for Carnegie Museums. “I can now look forward to being a part of bringing the joy of the museums to future generations.” Wright joined Carnegie Museums in April after most recently serving as director of finance and operations for Chartiers Valley School District. She has also served in senior leadership roles at Propel Schools—a regional network of eight public charter schools—and the accounting firm R.D. Hoag & Associates.

One of the Nation’s Best Art Museums  

Readers of USA Today have chosen The Andy Warhol Museum as one of their favorite art museums in America. The Warhol came in at No. 10 on USA Today’s annual Readers’ Choice Awards for 2025, with the newspaper noting the museum’s expansiveness—“the world’s largest collection of Warhol art and archives” spread across eight floors.

 “Making some of these small changes in what we call a particular plant can change how people think about that plant and how people think about the problem.” 

– Mason Heberling, associate curator in the Section of Botany at the Museum of Natural History, speaking about invasive species and the museum’s current Uprooted exhibition to The New York Times

CMU Student Artists Show Their Work at The Warhol    

The Andy Warhol Museum for the first time hosted an exhibition of art by students from Carnegie Mellon University, its namesake’s alma mater. This spring, the museum co-presented Holding Still, Holding On with the university’s School of Art MFA program, which featured new works by the Class of 2025—Frankmarlin, Izsys Archer, Tingting Cheng, Chantal Feitosa-Desouza, and Max Tristan Watkins. “This is an amazing collaboration with The Warhol Museum for the third-year thesis exhibition. I’m incredibly proud of everybody,” said Kattie Hubbard, director of the MFA program, in a TribLive story.

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Photo: Courtesy of NASA

Astronauts don’t get a lot of fresh veggies in their diets, but NASA continues to make progress on zero-gravity gardening. In 2015, astronauts on the International Space Station made history by  becoming the first to eat food grown in space—red romaine lettuce, which they dressed in olive oil and balsamic vinegar.

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Pittsburgh boasts more public staircases than any other city in the United States, a fact celebrated not only by the city’s pedestrians but also by local artists. Artist: Laura Jean McLaughlin

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Andy Warhol’s film Sleep (1963)  consists of 5 1/2 hours of footage of his boyfriend, John Giorno, sleeping. The inspiration for the project came partly from Giorno’s love of napping.

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Photo: courtesy of National Museum of American History

One of the world’s first synthetic dyes was created by accident when an 18-year-old English chemist named William Henry Perkin was experimenting with treatments for malaria. His concoction didn’t combat the disease, but it did produce a brilliant purple stain that he called “mauveine,” or mauve.

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Hugs feel good, and they’re also good for your health. Medical studies have shown that regular hugging can reduce inflammation, lower blood pressure, promote production of the “love” hormone oxytocin, and even reduce the severity of the common cold.

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They are only charcoal and chalk sketches, kept in a flat file drawer. Most of the subjects are woodland creatures depicted in a style that you might see in children’s books. One sketch shows a groundhog happily napping. Another has a groundhog throwing a hissy fit to rebuff a hungry fox.

It’s been seven decades since the artist, Jay Matternes, made them while he apprenticed with Ottmar von Fuehrer, the chief staff artist of Carnegie Museum of Natural History in the 1950s. Matternes would go on to have a storied career in natural history illustration as a painter for the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History.

Even now, at the age of 91, Matternes recalls sketching all manner of mammals and more for Carnegie Museum of Natural History. But he never expected anyone would have kept his art.

“I always assumed that the work I did there had long since ended up in a dumpster or a landfill,” Matternes exclaims in surprise when reached by phone from his home in Fairfax, Virginia. “I’m very pleased they preserved them.”

The groundhogs he sketched for children as part of the museum’s education programming are included among roughly 100 pieces of his art depicting animals ranging from elk to warthogs. They even include working sketches he did for a museum display titled “Tide Pool Universe” that are part of a little-known but rich collection of naturalist art at the Museum of Natural History.

The art collection includes thousands of prints, drawings, paintings, and photographs created by professional artists and illustrators such as Matternes, and lesser-known local artists.

Although some works from the collection have been displayed in past exhibitions, most have never been seen by the public. But lately, the naturalist artworks have been getting some attention from Deirdre Smith. A scholar of contemporary art and visual culture who joined the museum in 2022 as an assistant curator, Smith has been exploring the collection for what it can teach audiences today about the history of the museum, as well as the intersection of art and science. Smith, who also teaches museum studies at the University of Pittsburgh, gave a lecture last year to highlight some of the pieces from the collection. She hopes to feature some of its hidden treasures one day in an exhibition.

“The Natural History Art Collection is visually quite lush and varied,” Smith says. “But more importantly, it archives fascinating stories about the history of art and image making, the history of science, the history of our museum, and the history of animal and plant life.”

The history of the collection extends back more than a half century to a longtime director of the museum and an essential figure in the institution’s history, M. Graham Netting.

Born in Wilkinsburg in 1904, Netting was curator of the Section of Amphibians and Reptiles until he took over as museum director from 1954 to 1975. Early in his tenure, the well-connected conservationist and environmentalist helped create the museum’s Laurel Highlands research station, Powdermill Nature Reserve.

Powdermill is among Netting’s most important contributions to the museum, but a lesser-known part of his legacy is the art collection he began assembling late in his career. He’d developed an interest in photography and art, collecting pieces both for his personal collection and on behalf of the museum. In 1973, Netting used a $25,000 grant from the Scaife Family Charitable Trusts to formally start what was then called the “M. Graham Netting Animal Portraiture Collection.”

He grew the bulk of the collection after his retirement, mostly in the 1970s and early 1980s, to what’s now nearly 2,000 items—drawings, paintings, prints, photographs, and more by scientists, naturalists, illustrators, and other skilled makers. In a November 1979 story that appeared in Carnegie magazine, Netting wrote that his goal in creating the collection was to preserve these purchases, gifts, and museum ephemera “for the enjoyment of future generations of nature lovers.”

Some of it was exhibited in 1976 and 1978, but for most of its existence the collection has been quietly cared for in off-site storage where it is rarely viewed by the public.

Hidden Treasures

Netting’s taste in art reflected his personal interests and connections with sportsmen’s and conservation groups, Smith says. “It leads to some of the eclectic nature of the collection. But I think it’s eclectic in the best way.”

Moving between the 7-foot-tall steel storage cabinets, Smith can show off everything from lifelike wooden duck decoys, including a mallard couple crafted by renowned Canadian carver Ken Anger, to Matternes’ sketches, some of which were published in a February 1980 Carnegie magazine cover story on groundhogs (complete with recipes).

She slides from one drawer a 23-by-27-inch silver gelatin print of a deer family that looks freshly made, and certainly more recent than 1892. That’s when the haunting photo Doe with Twin Fawns was photographed at night on a Montana shore by George Shiras III, a native of Allegheny City (now Pittsburgh’s North Side neighborhood) and a pioneer in wildlife photography because of his use of flash technology for nighttime shots.

The collection also contains many fine paintings of birds. The luminous 14.5-by-10.5-inch watercolor Golden Orioles depicts a bright yellow male and a more neutral-toned female at a nest. It’s one of 20 paintings that Netting purchased for the collection by Winifred Austen, an art world pioneer as one of few women working in the field of naturalist illustration at the turn of the 20th century. She painted Golden Orioles for F.B. Kirman’s The British Bird Book, for which she was the only woman hired.

“They’re really among the most beautiful and successful images that we have in the entire collection,” Smith says.

Many of the illustrations in the collection were created to be sold as fine art prints. One of Smith’s favorite items is a matted, plastic-sheathed, 23-by-19-inch watercolor of a mud salamander that’s much more vibrant and beautiful than its name sounds. It was painted in the early 1970s by David M. Dennis, who, like many artists in the collection, was a prolific producer of illustrations for scientific articles and field guides.

Smith says you can see Netting’s art expertise and “shrewd hand” in choosing Dennis’ salamander because of its interesting composition: a bird’s-eye view of the S-shaped reddish salamander on a bed of brown leaf litter with a black beetle. Netting was not shy about sharing his opinion of artwork, either. In correspondence with Dennis, the two go back and forth at length over which works the museum will acquire, with Netting occasionally critiquing the artist’s skills.

The collection’s oldest artifacts were purchased in 1918 by Netting’s predecessor, museum director William Jacob Holland. They include 50 watercolors that Henry W. Elliott painted in the 1870s documenting the Alaskan fur seal population and trade on the Pribilof Islands. Elliott’s work led to conservation efforts to protect the fur seal from over-hunting, an early example of how image making and viewing can be not just science but also activism.

But Smith says she most values the art made by and connected to people who worked at the museum, such as Matternes and von Fuehrer. The latter went on to work as chief staff artist until 1965, creating volumes of art with his wife, Hanne, including background paintings for dioramas still on view in the Hall of North American Wildlife such as that for the Woodland Caribou Group. His gouache studies for the display, which are based on photographs taken on a museum expedition to the Canadian Rockies, are also part of the Natural History Art Collection.

The talented Matternes originally hoped to succeed von Fuehrer as the museum’s chief staff artist. But von Fuehrer wasn’t ready to retire when Matternes graduated,  so Matternes moved on. He wound up at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, where he painted murals of extinct mammals and illustrated prestigious publications such as Science, National Geographic, and Scientific American. His career was the subject of a book published in August 2024, Jay Matternes: Paleoartist and Wildlife Painter.  

Matternes still has fond memories of his beginnings in Pittsburgh, including going to nearby Schenley Park with the von Fuehrers to run their boxer, Blitz. Of course, they took their paint boxes to capture the landscape en plein air. “I worked very hard and those were excellent years for me,” Matternes recalls fondly, happy to hear how much of his work is preserved. “I thought I would be forgotten.”

Among the contributions to the collection from lesser-known artists was what Smith called a “real treat of a find” of a cartoon poking fun at von Fuehrer by a long-ago staffer who signed it “Deirdre.” In addition to fine art, Netting intended for the art collection to store institutional ephemera like these drawings, which can now speak to artmaking as part of the daily life, and fun, of working at the Museum of Natural History.

“Art has a unique power to make all of these histories and subjects vivid, again and again,” Smith notes.

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What’s all that powdery “soil” on the surface of the Moon? It’s actually pulverized rock created by meteorites smashing onto the Moon’s surface.

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Many children suck their thumbs, but humans aren’t the only species with this habit. Elephant calves suck their trunks, and for the same reason—both are natural reflexes that are used for comfort.

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This April marks the 70th anniversary of when results from the first viable polio vaccine were announced. The vaccine was tested and developed by Jonas Salk, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.

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Paleontologists have long wondered what saber-toothed cats really looked like, since all they had to go on were fossilized bones. That changed last year, when researchers revealed the discovery of a 32,000-year-old frozen, mummified cub in the Siberian permafrost, providing the most comprehensive picture yet of the apex predator.

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Artificial intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing how humans shop, work—and, now, how we create art. A portrait of the British mathematician Alan Turing created by an AI-powered humanoid robot sold at auction last year for nearly $1.1 million. Turing is known as the father of modern computer science and an early contributor to the field of AI.

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Daniel and Carole Kamin have made another historic gift to Carnegie Museums: a $25 million gift to the Museum of Natural History to update its largest exhibition and support its scientific mission for generations to come. A portion of the money will be used in the next few years to renovate the museum’s Dinosaurs in Their Time exhibition, which opened in 2007, and the gallery that houses the exhibition will be renamed the Daniel G. and Carole L. Kamin Hall of Dinosaurs. This gift is the largest individual monetary gift to the museum since Andrew Carnegie founded Carnegie Museums in 1895, and it follows the Kamins’ earlier 2024 gift of $65 million to Carnegie Science Center. “Twice in the past year, Dan and Carole Kamin have demonstrated their profound commitment to the work of our museums through transformational gifts totaling $90 million,” said  Steven Knapp, president of Carnegie Museums. “We are deeply grateful for their unparalleled endorsement of our museums’ power to inspire and inform, and we are honored to be a part of their great legacy of generosity in the Pittsburgh region.”

The People Pick Carnegie Music Hall   

Carnegie Music Hall has earned the praise of the American Institute of Architects, winning the AIA People’s Choice Award in the 41st annual Design Pittsburgh Awards. The 130-year-old concert venue, which reopened last year after a $9 million renovation, garnered 3,447 votes to win top honors. 

Plans for ‘The Factory’ Approved

The Andy Warhol Museum recently received approval from Pittsburgh’s Planning Commission for its updated plan to build a performance and event space across the street from the museum. Inspired by Warhol’s famous Silver Factory in New York City, the new design for “The Factory Creative Arts Center” calls for a three-story, standing-room venue that can hold around 900 people. The event space is a cornerstone of the museum’s Pop District initiative, a 10-year strategic expansion announced in 2022 to transform the six-block section of the museum’s North Shore neighborhood into a cultural and economic hub. 

“Harris’ work is proof of African American culture, proof of what we really were, really are, where we’ve come from, and how we actually live. I appreciate challenging and refuting the negative stereotypes that plague the Black community through Harris’ lens.” 

–Charlene Foggie-Barnett, Charles “Teenie” Harris community archivist

Visions of a Just World  

Twelve winners from more than 100 submissions were recently recognized as part of the second iteration of Envisioning a Just Pittsburgh, an inclusive call for art that encourages artists in the region to share their visions for a just and equitable Pittsburgh. Taking first place in Visual Arts was Unseen Hands by Matthew Raffaele and Emily Powell. The Inclusive Call for Art is a joint initiative of Carnegie Museums, Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, the University of Pittsburgh, 1Hood Media, and the August Wilson African American Cultural Center. A full list of winning submissions can be found at carnegiemuseums.org/envisioning-2024.

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More than 4,000 visitors enjoyed free admission to Carnegie Science Center on September 1, thanks to the generosity of Dan and Carole Kamin. The free day also provided an opportunity to recognize the Kamin family for their transformational $65 million gift to the Science Center, announced in January.

Historical Marker Recognizes Charles ‘Teenie’ Harris

The late Charles “Teenie” Harris, one of the most prolific documentarians of African American life in the 20th century, was recognized on September 27 with a state historical marker outside his home in Pittsburgh’s Homewood neighborhood. Visitors to Carnegie Museum of Art now have unprecedented access to the Teenie Harris archives in the museum’s new gallery dedicated to Harris.

Charles “Teenie” Harris, Charles “Teenie” Harris’ brick house at 7604 Mulford Street, with striped canvas awning over porch, Homewood, Heinz Family Fund, © Carnegie Museum of Art, Charles “Teenie” Harris Archive

Dispatches From Borneo

In October, Jennifer Sheridan traveled halfway around the world on her latest research trip to the rainforests of Borneo. The associate curator of amphibians and reptiles at Carnegie Museum of Natural History spent two weeks trekking through rainforests and crossing streams to record frog calls, collect specimens, and gather data to better understand the impact of humans on biodiversity. Meanwhile, people 9,500 miles away in Pittsburgh followed Sheridan’s adventures via a pair of livestream events, and even played a game of “Borneo Frog Bingo” to track the different species she encountered.

2024 Davey Awards

The Andy Warhol Museum’s boutique production studio, The Warhol Creative, was honored with several Davey Awards, which recognize films produced by smaller creative agencies. A 30-second- long advertisement for the Miami City Ballet’s production of Swan Lake took home Best in Show, and The Warhol Creative also won awards for a mini-documentary about The Andy Warhol Museum’s 30th anniversary, and another for the Miami City Ballet’s Nutcracker Nation.

“The first step to change is to have an idea of what you want those changes to be.” 

Ron Idoko, associate director of the University of Pittsburgh’s Center on Race and Social Problems, announcing the second annual “Envisioning a Just Pittsburgh” initiative, a call for diverse art co-organized by Carnegie Museums

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The world’s first digital camera was invented nearly half a century ago in 1975 by Steven Sasson, a 24-year-old employee at Eastman Kodak. After demonstrating his camera to Kodak executives, Sasson was ordered to keep it a secret out of concern that it would harm Kodak’s film sales.  

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The tiny aquatic animals known as tardigrades are not only cute, but they’re also nearly indestructible. They can survive extreme temperatures, radiation, dehydration, and even outer space.

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Soyal is a sacred ceremony celebrated by the Pueblo, Zuni, and Hopi people that begins on the winter solstice and lasts up to 16 days. Its aim: to bring the sun back to the world.

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Millions of Lego sets will be gifted to kids this holiday season, but where does the popular toy’s name come from? It’s a combination of the first two letters of the Danish words “leg godt,” which means “play well.”

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Andy Warhol famously embraced new technologies and media in his art, including television. From 1985 to 1987, he hosted his own show called Andy Warhol’s Fifteen Minutes on MTV. Guests included Debbie Harry, Grace Jones, John Oates, and Ian McKellen.

Andy Warhol T.V. Productions, Andy Warhol’s Fifteen Minutes [pilot], 1985 1” videotape, color, sound, 30 minutes, © The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved.

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Carnegie Museum of Natural History contains one of the most comprehensive records of nature and culture in the world, caring for some 22 million specimens and objects that range from birds and botany to archaeological artifacts and dinosaur fossils. But few people know that it also boasts an impressive art collection. This watercolor painting, titled Golden Orioles, was made in 1909 by the English artist Winifred Austen for F.B. Kirkman’s The British Bird Book. Born in 1876, Austen trained at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London, was a member of the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers and Engravers, and exhibited her work frequently throughout her lifetime. And despite working in an overwhelmingly male-dominated profession, she made a place for herself and was the only woman to be published in the British Bird Book. Austen died in 1964.

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When Major League Baseball integrated Negro League statistics in its official records, Josh Gibson became MLB’s all-time batting average champion with a .372 career mark. The slugger starred for the Homestead Grays and Pittsburgh Crawfords in the 1930s and ‘40s, and is buried in Pittsburgh’s Allegheny Cemetery. 

Charles “Teenie” Harris, Portrait of Josh Gibson, Homestead Grays baseball player, standing on Forbes Field, 1942, Gift of the Estate of Charles “Teenie” Harris, © Carnegie Museum of Art

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Yawning can be contagious, but it may not just spread from person to person. Research suggests domesticated dogs can “catch a yawn” from their human companions, too!

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Photo: Heinz-Josef Lücking

The average Stonehenge sarsen—or large boulder—weighs 25 tons, and the largest of them weighs 30 tons.

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The original Buhl Planetarium and Institute of Popular Science on Pittsburgh’s North Side was home to the first rooftop siderostat telescope designed for public use rather than astronomical research.  

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Teaching is hard work, but K-12 educators spend even more time on duties outside of class. According to U.S. Department of Education statistics, teachers spend an average of 25.1 hours per week delivering instruction and an additional 27 hours on other school-related tasks and activities.

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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.  

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