The installations at the IU Art Museum show collections of pieces that may not fit into larger exhibitions.
The latest of these installations are three pieces by pop artist Andy Warhol, now on display in the first-floor gallery as part of an installation called “Famous Faces: Portraits by Warhol.”
Nan Brewer, curator of works on paper for IUAM, said the pieces were part of a gift given a few years ago by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
“Their ‘Warhol Photographic Legacy Program’ must have gone so well that, in 2010, we were approached and they said, ‘Would you like another gift?’” Brewer said. “This time it was of print material. They probably didn’t have as many duplicates, quite as much material for that gift. We received seven new Andy Warhol prints.”
The first gift of Warhol work came in 2007, the foundation’s 20th anniversary, Brewer said.
Colleges and universities around the United States submitted proposals describing their current Warhol collections and how they would use supplemental pieces. More than 180 institutions received pieces as a result of the initiative.
Brewer said IUAM’s proposal was approved and the museum received about 100 Polaroid photographs and 150 black-and-white shots by Warhol.
“They’re meant for educational purposes,” Brewer said. “You can display them, you can use them. We put them up on a website. You can actually go on our IUAM web module and you can find all of the images from the photographic collection that can’t be sold. They really wanted them to have educational use.”
In life, the artist was careful to keep every photograph he took, Brewer said.
“Warhol shot, constantly, black-and-white photographs,” Brewer said. “It was kind of the pre-digital age where you were doing self-documentation. His Polaroids were really studies — they weren’t for sale. They were studies for his prints and paintings, his photographic imagery.”
Warhol’s habits as an artist and the amount of work he left behind gave the foundation plenty of work to choose from when distributing to universities and colleges.
“He actually was such a pack rat, he started keeping boxes he called ‘time capsules,’” Brewer said. “Everything from his day, he would throw into these boxes. He died very suddenly of complications following gallbladder surgery, so all of a sudden the foundation had a massive amount of material.”
Brewer said part of the first gift, the Polaroid and black-and-white images, were part of a show a few years back called “Shot by Warhol.” One of the more recent gifts went on display as part of a food Themester series, though the others had not previously been displayed.
“I thought it would be nice to show more of that material, to acknowledge this new acquisition from the Warhol foundation, and I decided to showcase famous faces on portrait,” Brewer said.
The three newer pieces in this particular installation are not the usual commissioned or pop-art icon portraits viewers might associate with Warhol, Brewer said.
“I looked at the material we received and thought, ‘It’s interesting.’ Usually when you think of Warhol ‘famous faces,’ you think of pop icons like Liz Taylor, people of his period, or they were commissioned portraits by the rich and famous, which many of his Polaroids were,” Brewer said.
The portraits on display have historical relevance as well, especially in the image of Sitting Bull.
“Through the advent of photography, he became a pop figure of his own time,” Brewer said. “He was the leader of the Battle of Little Bighorn. However, he also had an entertainment aspect of his life where he was a very famous figure as part of ‘Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show.’ That kind of mix of historical importance and performance could have also appealed to Warhol.”
