"Summer of Andy: Program Celebrates Andy Warhol's 75th Birthday"
2003-06-13 until 2003-10-05
Andy Warhol Museum
Pittsburgh, PA, USA

This summer, The Andy Warhol Museum is presenting numerous special exhibitions and programs under the banner of Summer of Andy- a celebration of the fact that August 6, 2003 would have been Andy Warhols 75th birthday. Three exhibitions, Where is Elvis?, Douglas Gordon: Blind Star and Too Hot to Handle: Creating Controversy Through Political Cartoons open in June with an opening event on Saturday, June 14. Next up are two more special exhibitions, Keith Edmier and Farrah Fawcett and The American Supermarket. Both exhibitions will be on view July 13 through October 5, 2003 with an opening event on Saturday, July 12.

Keith Edmier and Farrah Fawcett The exhibition, Keith Edmier and Farrah Fawcett, examines the connection between artist and muse through a series of collaborative sculptures and photographs by contemporary artist, Keith Edmier, and actress and artist, Farrah Fawcett. Produced by Art Production Fund, the exhibition features the results of a two-year collaboration between the artists, spurred by Edmiers childhood admiration of Fawcett.

The Exhibition The centerpiece of the exhibition, Keith Edmier and Farrah Fawcett 2000, includes a pair of nude sculptures the artists made of each other. Both life-size, a reclining Fawcett is rendered in white marble; a standing Edmier in bronze. In the sculptures, the artists are depicted less as themselves than as ideals. Edmiers boyish good looks are enhanced and Fawcett has not aged since her 1976 television debut. In reinventing the image of Fawcett that was so crucial to his youth, Edmier shifts the narrative of his past from first to third person, unhooking it from autobiography. But by providing a grown-up Edmier as mate to a 1970s Fawcett, the collaboration sustains the original fantasy, suggesting that past is never wholly resolved.

The American Supermarket The American Supermarket is a recreation the famous 1964 Pop Art installation of the same name. A collaboration between the great names of Pop Art including Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Richard Artschwager, Robert Watts, Tom Wesselman and others, the exhibition is an evocation of an ordinary 1964 supermarket - complete with meat, cheese and fruit counters, neon signs and jaunty background musak. In the installations aisles, real foods are mixed together with iconic Pop works such as Warhols stacks of Campbells Soup cans and Robert Watts alluring chrome fruits and multi-colored wax eggs.

The American Supermarket was recreated by the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt for their recent exhibition, Shopping: A Century of Art and Consumer Culture. The installations presentation at The Warhol is the first time it will be seen in the United States since its sensational 1964 debut at New York Citys Bianchini Gallery.

IMAGE:
Douglas Gordon
Collage

Related Links:

Indepth Arts Resources for the State of Pennsylvania

Other Important Exhibitions in United States