Press Releases
October 2008
ANDY WARHOL AT UNIVERSITY ART MUSEUM
Look This Way:
Photographic Portraits from the University Art Collections
(Main Gallery/First Floor)
Andy Warhol:
Portraits from The Andy Warhol Photographic Legacy Program
(Main Gallery/Second Floor)
Andy Warhol:
Outer and Inner Space
(Nancy Hyatt Liddle Gallery)
On view October 23 - December 21, 2008
Art & Culture Talks (ACT) Program:
Tuesday, December 2, 7:00 p.m.
"Andy Warhol: Myth and Reality" lecture by Roberta Bernstein, art historian, Professor Emeritus of Art History, UAlbany and former assistant to Andy Warhol.
Free and open to the public.
ALBANY, NY--- The University Art Museum is pleased to announce the opening of three new exhibitions: Andy Warhol: Portraits from The Andy Warhol Photographic Legacy Program; Andy Warhol: Outer and Inner Space; and Look This Way: Photographic Portraits from the University Art Collections.
From the early use of photo sources for his portraits of Hollywood stars like Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor to his paintings of car wrecks, plane crashes, and the Birmingham race riots, photography has always played a crucial role in Warhol’s artistic practice. The portraits from the Photographic Legacy Program, taken from the 1970s until his untimely death in 1987, provide a rare and intimate look at Warhol’s own diaristic impulse. No one escaped his notice and nothing seemed too insignificant to record. In this exhibition, celebrities such as Diana Vreeland, Georgia O’Keefe, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar are captured in staged Polaroids, while other celebrities are casually snapped at restaurants and parties. These images exist along side anonymous New Yorkers on the street and in undisclosed locations. By turning an indiscriminate camera on all that he saw, Warhol managed to make his subjects appear both ordinary and fabulous at the same time.
The museum offers a further opportunity to experience Andy Warhol’s creative production in its newly dedicated Nancy Hyatt Liddle Gallery where Warhol’s pioneering double screen video-based film, Outer and Inner Space (1965), will be on view continuously during museum hours. Considered a masterpiece of video art, Outer and Inner Space captures Edie Sedgwick in a dialogue with her own video-taped image. She is seated beside a monitor showing videos of her self that Warhol had made previously using an early portable camera.
In each of the two screens, Sedgwick appears in profile on the monitor and facing forward in the “live” film image. As she talks nonstop to an unseen person off-screen, Sedgwick appears hyper-aware one moment, distracted and disengaged the next. The results are a mesmerizing four-headed portrait, “suggesting both the silkscreened multiples of Marilyn Monroe or Jacqueline Kennedy, as well as Warhol’s vast series of 16-milimeter screen tests,” according to New York Times film critic, J. Hoberman, who goes on to say that, “Outer and Inner Space is one of [Warhol’s] great portraits.”
Selected as a companion exhibition to Andy Warhol: Portraits from The Andy Warhol Photographic Legacy Program, the museum’s first-floor exhibition, Look This Way features 34 black and white photographic portraits from the University Art Collections including work by Larry Clark, Lucien Clergue, Larry Fink, Jerome Liebling, Mary Ellen Mark, Helmut Newton, and Edward Steichen. From Helmut Newton’s steely eroticism to Mary Ellen Mark’s penetrating humanity, Look This Way presents an opportunity to contemplate iconic celebrity portraits alongside anonymous, but no less compelling portraits of ordinary people. Exhibition highlights include Edward Steichen’s classic portraits of Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Paul Robeson, and Gary Copper; Larry Clark’s anonymous portrait of a hard-bitten teenage girl; Larry Fink’s fragmented shots of unknown society partygoers; and Jerome Liebling’s stark portrait of an unidentified mid-Western grain worker. Exhibited shoulder to shoulder, these striking twentieth century portraits underscore Warhol’s own penchant for capturing a wide array of human countenances, social interactions, and private revelations.
Art & Culture Talks (ACT) Program:
Tuesday, December 2 at 7:00 pm
Roberta Bernstein, art historian, Professor Emeritus of Art History, UAlbany and former assistant to Andy Warhol will give a lecture in the museum titled "Andy Warhol: Myth and Reality."
Dr. Bernstein was an art history student in New York City, and worked in 1966-67 as an assistant to Andy Warhol in his studio “The Factory”. She received her Ph.D. in art history from Columbia University in 1975. After teaching at Columbia and Barnard College, she joined the University at Albany faculty in 1980. Her research is focused on the work of selected artists since the mid-twentieth century. Publications include Jasper Johns' Paintings and Sculptures: 1954-1974: "The Changing Focus of the Eye," UMI Research Press, 1985; major essays in retrospective catalogues of Johns (Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1996) and Ellsworth Kelly (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1996); as well as other catalogues and articles on these and other artists including Andy Warhol, Cy Twombly, and Marisol. She was co-curator of an exhibition, Jasper Johns: Numbers (2003) for the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
This exhibition has been funded by the Office of the President, Office of the Provost, and University Auxiliary Services.
For further information or visual materials, please call (518) 442-4035 or visit our website at www. albany.edu/museum.
MUSEUM HOURS:
Tuesday through Friday 10 a.m. to 5 pm
Saturday and Sunday noon to 4 pm