The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts

The funded exhibition "In Conversation with the Cosmos" is the first comprehensive survey in the United States dedicated to the late Filipino artist David Medalla (1938–2020).⁠ His life and work cultivated intimate forms of exchange between collaborators, friends, and lovers in the service of “cosmic propulsions,” “Impromptus,” and other otherworldly propositions. The exhibition presents the accumulations of a creative life imbued with an anti-institutional ethos and a commitment to impermanence and change.
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The Foundation supports this exhibition for highlighting the artist’s driving curiosity, collaborative spirit, and pioneering point of view - and moving him to a more visible position in contemporary art history.⁠
David Medalla, Mondrian Fan Club, Mondrian in Excelsis, 1993.
Inkjet on archival paper. 12 5/8 × 18 1/2 in. Courtesy of David Medalla Archive and another vacant space, Berlin..⁠⁠⁠

The funded exhibition, “Xican-a.o.x. Body,” now on view at Pérez Art Museum Miami is the first major exhibition to highlight work by artists who foreground the body as a site of political agency and imagination, artistic investigation, decolonization, and alternative forms of community. It emerges at the intersection of experimental artistic practices dating back to the Chicano Movement’s key years in the 1960s and 1970s and embraces the work of artists who identify in myriad ways—including Mexican American, Chicana/o, Xicanx, Indigenous, Latinx, Black, Brown, and Q***r.

Organized by the American Federation for the Arts, the Foundation supports this exhibition for uncovering and celebrating the marginalized voices that laid the foundation for contemporary artists who employ the body—both physically and ideologically—as an active site of resistance against racist and reductionist cultural narratives.⁠
Patssi Valdez, Hot Pink (still), 1980-1983. Digitized 35 mm video, color, sound, 5’48’’
.valdez ***rArt

Closing soon tomorrow, Sunday August 4th is “Spiral Time” at Smack Mellon is the organization’s 2024 Emerging Artist Summer Group Exhibition. This show brings together ten artists to explore radical ecologies of resistance that challenge the temporal pressures imposed by capitalism. The artists decentered speed and efficiency, borrowing from slow, careful, and intentional practices such as seedkeeping, intergenerational storytelling and synchronic experimentation. Working across sculpture, installation, video, and other media, the artists engage broadly with the dire concerns of the climate catastrophe while invoking cyclical ancestral systems and future possibilities for horizontal relationships to the Earth.

The Foundation supports Smack Mellon for its care in supporting artist working without gallery representation and ensuring they have an opportunity to gain the recognition and consideration they deserve while supporting them with resources, networking opportunities, and community support.
Image 1 - 2. Ruth Jeyaveeran, In Part of Everything, 2023. Installation view. Photo by Etienne Frossard.
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“It’s not what you are that counts, it’s what they think you are.” – Andy Warhol.
Andy Warhol, Self-portrait, 1978. Photographic reproduction from 35mm negative. ©The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.

On view through Sunday, August 4th at Real Art Ways is a solo exhibition by painter Jeff Ostergren whose work intertwines histories of pharmaceuticals and color. His pointillist, color-saturated paintings, sculptures, and videos, infused with actual pharmaceuticals and chemicals, utilize imagery from art history and advertising to explore the ecstasy and toxicity of our present moment. Ostergren works from images taken from pharmaceutical advertising that bear an uncanny reference to art historical works, particularly from the Impressionist period, which was contemporaneous with the rise of synthetic chemistry. These images of idealized leisure form potent means of understanding representations of race, gender, sexuality, disability, and class.

The Foundation supports Real Art Ways for its open multidisciplinary approach to exhibitions, robust outreach and education programs, and commitment to making a permanent home for art in its community.
Image 1. Jeff Ostergren, Some tranquilizers overtranquilize, but on Stelazine she’s calm and alert, 2023. Pharmaceutical pills, and acrylic on polyester canvas over custom PVC strainer. 72 x 56 inches.

Image 2. Jeff Ostergren, Into each life some rain must fall, 2023. Pharmaceutical pils and acrylic on polyester canvas over custom PVC stretcher bars, 36 x 54 inches.

The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts is delighted to share an excerpt from Volume 6 of The Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné, Paintings and Sculptures, mid-1977–1980, published by Phaidon Press earlier this month. Comprised of two slipcased books, this volume includes 741 paintings and sculptures, and is the last of four volumes dedicated to Warhol’s works of the 1970s:

“In 1979, Warhol’s silkscreen printer Rupert Jasen Smith introduced him to a new material: finely ground glass particles that adhered to the silkscreen ink in his prints and paintings before the ink dried. The diamond dust, as they called it, was first used for two 1979 print projects: an experimental portfolio, 'Grapes D.D. (Diamond Dust)', and five portfolios, 'Shadows I–V'. By the end of 1979, Warhol was using diamond dust in his 'Shadow' paintings; by mid-1980, his diamond dust 'Gem' paintings were in progress or already completed, realizing the idea for ‘Diamond paintings’ from three years before. Warhol produced nearly seventy diamond dust 'Gem' paintings: nine large paintings, eight medium-sized paintings, and fifty-one small paintings, many of the last group distributed as gifts. […] While they [the Gems] comprise two independent groups of work that were produced nearly two years apart, the works are based on the same subject matter and the same images of two gemstones—one emerald-cut and one round—and can be considered two states of a single project.”

Please visit the link in our bio to learn more about the Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné.
Image 1: Andy Warhol. Gem, 1980. 14 x 18 inches, each. © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.

Image 2: Andy Warhol. Gem, 1980. 32 x 42 inches, each. © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.

Image 3: Andy Warhol. Shadow, 1979. 14 x 11 inches, each. © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.

Image 4: The Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné: Volume 6, Paintings and Sculptures mid-1977–1980 (New York and London: Phaidon Press, 2024)
#1980

“Paul Stephen Benjamin: Black of Night,” now on view at Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, is an exhibition of works that explore the artist's ongoing investigation of blackness through concept, thought, and perception. The exhibition features video installations, paintings, text-based work, and sculpture as conceptual entry points for dialogue around identity, race, and patriotism. Focusing on the connotations of the color black in society, culture, and language, Benjamin incorporates history, text, imagery, and sound from popular culture, in turn discussing the absence and presence of color.

The Foundation supports Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts for providing a diverse and comprehensive array of resources for artistic production and its thoughtful approach to community building.
1. Paul Stephen Benjamin, Black Suns, 2024. Black light, black fixture, black extension cord, black power strip. Courtesy of the artist. Photography by Colin Conces.
2. Paul Stephen Benjamin, Black Flag (In Memory of Malcolm and Betty), 2024. Black cotton, black lace, black metal, black rope, black threads. Courtesy of the artist. Photography by Colin Conces.

Now on view at Sculpture Center is “Tolia Astakhishvili: between father and mother”. Working across sculpture, drawing, painting, sound, and video, Tolia Astakhishvili unsettles and transforms space inviting viewers to investigate the existence of space as transient. Her built environments posit architecture as an unfixed and transforming entity shaped by those who live through it, while her sculpture attends to disavowed space and the overlapping markers of use, authorship, and social position that produce different settings of decay. Astakhishvili’s work disrupts a building’s ability to designate and distribute its own space, instead overriding it with new structures, layers of used things, and other detritus. This exhibition considers sculpture as a form of sorting, and, by extension, choosing and dividing. Self-effacing yet monumental and accumulative, Tolia Astakhishvili: between father and mother performs a problem of discernment familiar to art and life.⁠
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The Foundation supports Sculpture Center for empowering artists to create new work in a variety of innovative methods and providing an outlet for globally sourced ideas in New York.⁠⁠
1. Tolia Astakhishvili, When the others are within us, 2024, detail, Tolia Astakhishvili: between father and mother, SculptureCenter, New York, 2024. Plasterboard, wood, oil, coffee, pigment, cement, hooks, found objects, paper, pencil, ink, light 362 3/8 x 51 1/8 x 53 1⁄2 inches. Photo: Dylan Peirce
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2. Tolia Astakhishvili, Can’t stop living, 2024, detail, Tolia Astakhishvili: between father and mother, SculptureCenter, New York, 2024. Cement board, fabric, rockwool, plaster, pipes, paper, ink, plasterboard, plexiglass, photographs, light, particle board. Courtesy the artist and LC Queisser, Tbilisi. Photo: Charles Benton.⁠⁠⁠⁠
# sculpturecenter

The funded exhibition “Amalia Mesa-Bains: Archaeology of Memory” is on view at El Museo del Barrio, the only East Coast venue to host the traveling show. This exhibition is the first retrospective by the Chicana artist, curator, and theorist. Mesa-Bains has been a leading figure in Chicanx art for nearly half a century, exploring themes of intersectional feminism, environmentally centered spirituality, and cultural diversity to counter the racist and gendered erasures of colonial repression. The exhibition features over 40 works including the artist’s large-scale “altar-installations”, as well as prints, artist books, and codices. In the mid-‘70s, Mesa-Bains’s research in Mexican ancestral traditions led to her groundbreaking reimagination of sacred forms—altares (home altars) and ofrendas (offerings to the dead)— through a contemporary lens as installation art. In the following decades, the artist expanded her altar-based practice, converting domestic furniture into places of devotion and memory. Subsequently, Mesa-Bains began to consider spaces at the intersection of the private and public to explore the lives of female figures from historical and religious contexts. These sites provide the settings for Mesa-Bains’s archeological inquiry into women’s histories and their colonial erasure. Archaeology of Memory is a rare opportunity to view three decades of Mesa-Bains’s genre-defying artworks, many of which are on display together for the first time.

Organized by the Berkeley Art Museum/ Pacific Film Archive, the Foundation supports this exhibition for uplifting the work of women of color and facilitating continued critical cultural conversation about women’s history and rights as well as Chincanx tradtitions.⁠
Amalia Mesa-Bains: An Ofrenda for Dolores del Rio, 1984/1991. Plywood, mirrors, fabric, framed photographs, found objects, dried flowers, and glitter. 96 x 72 x 48 in

The funded exhibition “Vaginal Davis: Magnificent Product” now on view at Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sweeden features painting, film, and writing, highlighting the expansive practice of musician, performer, and visionary Vaginal Davis. Davis’s oeuvre is where q***r activism meets racial justice, where resistance meets joy, where punk meets the parlor room, and where Audre Lorde meets G.B Jones. From her hometown of Los Angles to her adopted home of Berlin, Davis has made scenes for a living as a leading lady in punk, q***r, and Black histories extending beyond solely the United States. This exhibition adopts a unique curatorial model that embraces Ms. Davis’s approach to art as a practice that holds no center but rather emerges from a connected community of people and spaces as well as plurality of form and media.⁠
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The Foundation supports this exhibition for its innovative, decentralized curatorial model that compliments the synergistic practice of the genre-defying multi-disciplinary artist.⁠⁠
1. Vaginal Davis, Wanda Coleman, 2021. Mixed media, 10 ½ x 7 ¾ x 1 ¼ inches. ⁠ © Vaginal Davis.

2. Vaginal Davis, Wanda Coleman, 2021(back). Mixed media, 10 ½ x 7 ¾ x 1 ¼ inches. ⁠ © Vaginal Davis.⁠⁠⁠
***rart ***rHistory

“Everything will be art and nothing will be art, because everything, as I believe, already is.” ⁠- Andy Warhol
Andy Warhol by Hans Namuth, Castelli Gallery, 1982. Poster, 22 x 20 inches.

Now on view at the Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library in Delaware is the funded exhibition “Transformation: Contemporary Artists at Winterthur”. Featuring over thirty nationally recognized artists, the exhibition connects the past and the present, showing contemporary art that draws inspiration from Winterthur's historic collections. This exhibition showcases how the old influences the new—forging connections across communities, transforming our perspectives about history, and commenting on our lives today. “Transformations: Contemporary Artists" signals the start of a new chapter for the museum, allowing historic objects to be seen in new contexts, bringing personal narratives and forgotten histories forward through time.⁠
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The Foundation supports this exhibition in its catalyzation of a meaningful evolution of Winterthur’s relationship with art and artists. ⁠⁠
Joey Quiñones, Vejigante: Mulatta, 2023. Terracotta, wood, paint, decals, gilding. © 2024 Joey Quiñones.⁠
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The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts is delighted to share an excerpt from Volume 6 of The Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné, Paintings and Sculptures, mid-1977–1980, published by Phaidon Press earlier this month. Comprised of two slipcased books, this volume includes 741 paintings and sculptures, and is the last of four volumes dedicated to Warhol’s works of the 1970s:

“Like his 'Oxidation' series, Warhol’s Shadows depart from the fundamentally representational basis of his work—i.e., portraiture and still life—and reflect his exploration of abstract art during the late 1970s and 1980s (e.g. the 1982 'Rorschach' and 1986 'Camouflage' series). Unlike the 'Oxidations', which are his first camera-less body of work since 1962, with the 'Shadows', Warhol considered the problem of how to generate photographic images that were not mimetic and appeared abstract. To produce ‘shadow images,’ in the summer of 1977, Warhol selected four exposures from two rolls of film shot by his studio assistant Ronnie Cutrone…In late 1979, when he began the second phase of the 'Shadows 'project, Warhol selected a fifth shadow image from one of Cutrone’s contact sheets. […] The 'Shadow' paintings vary by facture (brush versus sponge mop), surface (monochrome versus multicolored), and by the introduction of ground glass, known as diamond dust,
which his printer Rupert Jasen Smith distributed over the still-wet ink layer in seventy of the ninety-four paintings produced during the second phase of the project.”

Image 1: Andy Warhol. Warhol painting Shadows with a sponge mop, 860 Broadway, December 31, 1978. Reproduction from a 35mm negative.

Image 2: Andy Warhol. Shadow, 1978. 76 x 52 inches, each. © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.

Image 3: Andy Warhol. Shadow, 1977. 50 x 78 inches. © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.

Image 4: The Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné: Volume 6, Paintings and Sculptures mid-1977–1980 (New York and London: Phaidon Press, 2024)

Now on view at Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts is “Raven Halfmoon: Flags of Our Mothers”, the first major traveling exhibition for Native American sculptor Halfmoon. This exhibition features new and recent works made over the last five years including some of her largest works to date such as the over 12 feet tall three-part stacked ceramic sculpture, Flagbearer. Halfmoon’s practice spans torso-scaled and colossal-sized glazed stoneware sculptures, with their enormous scale and visual power opposing existing stereotypes and biases to create new monuments that honor the artist’s Caddo Nation ancestors and their traditions. Her inspiration stems from ancient Indigenous pottery, the colossal Olmec stone heads in Mexico, the Moai statues on Easter Island, and the major earth mounds her Caddo ancestors erected as temples, tombs, and residences for tribal leaders and priests. Fusing Caddo pottery traditions with more contemporary gestures, Halfmoon’s work reflects stories of the Caddo Nation, specifically her feminist linage and the power of its complexities.

The Foundation supports Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts for providing a diverse and comprehensive array of resources for artistic production and its thoughtful approach to community building.
Installation view of Raven Halfmoon: Flags of Our Mothers, 2024. On view at Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts. Photography by Colin Conces.

Now on view at ALMA | LEWIS is ‘My Memory is a Machine: Ambrose Rhapsody Murray,” the artists first exhibition in Pittsburgh. A self-taught, multidisciplinary artist, Murray, combines sewing, painting, material experimentation, film and collaborative projects in their work, creating stories to investigate our relationships to the colonial undercurrents of our lives, the charged symbology of black feminine bodies, and the ephemeral and layered qualities of memory and remembering.

The Foundation supports ALMA | LEWIS for fostering intellectual rigor and artistic experimentation through its residency program, exhibition series and community conversations.
Ambrose Rhapsody Murray, My Memory is a Machine, 2024. Photo by Tara Geyer
@01.ambrose # Warhol

Now on view at the Drawing Center is “Frank Walter: To Capture a Soul”, the first solo museum exhibition in the United States to focus on the work of Antiguan artist. The exhibition provides insight into not only Walter’s artistic practice but also his relationship to issues of race and identity, the legacy of slavery, the colonial and postcolonial experience, and the history and politics of Antigua, Barbuda, and beyond.

Also on view is “Josh Smith: Life Drawing" Smith’s homage to Walter, a testament to a shared commitment to approaching their subjects with honesty, curiosity and humble dedication. Smith echoes Walter in creating a meditative world in which reality and the imagination are inextricably connected.

The Foundation supports the Drawing Center for exploring the medium of drawing as primary, dynamic, and relevant to contemporary culture, the future of art, and creative thought.⁠
1. Frank Walter, Profile of a Man in Striped Shirt. Oil on card, 6.3 x 4.8 inches.

2. Josh Smith, Untitled, 2019. Marker and graphite on paper, 4.25 x 3.25 inches © Josh Smith

Now on view at Big Car's Tube Factory exhibition space is "Elisa Harkins: Ekvnv (Land), the Sacred Mother from Which We Came." With this exhibition Harkins looks at land in two different ways: a path toward healing due to the desecration of burial mounds in New Harmony, Indiana and how the Land Back movement addresses climate change. The exhibition is the culmination of a five year collaboration with Tube Facotry curator Shauta Marsh, as part of Big Car's decade long project 'Social Alchemy" that explores utopia and dystopia with an emphasis on the southern Indiana town of New Harmony that was twice the site of utopian experiments.

The Foundation supports Big Car Collaborative for supporting contemporary artists in Indianapolis through exhibitions and socially engaged projects.⁠
All images, Elisa Harkins, Ekvnv (Land), the Sacred Mother from Which We Came, 2024.

" New things are always better than old things." —Andy Warhol. From 'Andy Warhol on Junk Food, Coca-Cola, Drugs, Painting, God, and His Morning Routine,' by Glenn O'Briend for Interview, June 1977.
Andy Warhol, Self-portrait, 1973. Polaroid Type SX-70, 4 ¼ x 3 3/8 inches. ©The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.

Now on view at SculptureCenter is In Practice: Phoebe Collings-James. Phoebe Collings-James' ceramic sculptures explore the relationships between heresy, faith, and orthodoxies of church, state, and society. The works are intensely colored by iron-rich glazes, slips and various firing techniques, and imprinted with fragments of texts, each of Collings-James’ sculptures elaborates on the position of the heretic as a transmitter of incendiary speech, opposition from within, and ostracisation.

The Foundation supports SculptureCenter for being responsive to subtle shifts in contemporary practice and for providing an outlet for globally sources ideas in New York.⁠⁠
1 & 2. Phoebe Collings-James, Infidel [eye], 2024. Glazed stoneware ceramic on a steel base. 23 1⁄4 x 15 3/8 x 16 1⁄2 inches. Photos by Charles Benton.
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3. In Practice: Phoebe Collings-James, SculptureCenter, New York, 2024⁠. Photo by Charles Benton⁠⁠⁠

The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts is delighted to share an excerpt from Volume 6 of The Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné, Paintings and Sculptures, mid-1977–1980, published by Phaidon Press earlier this month. Comprised of two slipcased books, this volume includes 741 paintings and sculptures, and is the last of four volumes dedicated to Warhol’s works of the 1970s:

“The Reversal series is organized into six constituent groups, each dedicated to a key image from Warhol’s work of the 1960s and early 1970s: Marilyn (1962), Mona Lisa (1963), Big Electric Chair (1967-68), Mao (1972-73), photobooth Self-Portrait (1963-64), and Cow Wallpaper (1966). […] Warhol transformed the sources of his earlier work by a simple intervention: rather than recycle the images in their original state as photographic positives, he had his printer Rupert Jasen Smith reverse them, producing silkscreens based on photographic negatives of the images. These photographic reversals not only defamiliarized the well-known images from his old work, rendering them ghostly and uncanny, they radically altered the relationship to their painted backgrounds. Warhol’s painted backgrounds in the Reversal series are alternately monochromatic or more painterly and multicolored. Passages of color from the multicolored and painterly backgrounds flicker through the reversed apertures of the negative image.”

Please visit the link in our bio to learn more about the Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné.

Image 1: Andy Warhol. 9 Gold Marilyns (Reversal Series), 1979-80. 54 x 41 ¾ inches. © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.

Image 2: Andy Warhol. 20 Pink Maos (Reversal Series), 1979. 39 ¼ x 38 inches. © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.

Image 3: Andy Warhol. Mona Lisa (Reversal Series), 1979-80. 80 x 100 inches. © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.

Image 4: The Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné: Volume 6, Paintings and Sculptures mid-1977–1980 (New York and London: Phaidon Press, 2024)

The funded exhibition “Virginia Jaramillo: Principles of Equivalence” on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago is the first major retrospective and largest monograph exhbition to date of Jaramillo’s work. The exhbition traces the artist’s over six-decade career from the mid 1960s to the present, featuring more than 40 abstract paintings and handmade paper works that reveal her long-standing preoccupation with the relationship between the earthly and metaphysical realms. Drawing on a continued study of physics, science fiction, mythologies, and modernist design, Jaramillo’s work reaches for the fundamentals of comprehension: how our experience of the physical forms the basis of ideas, and how abstraction can offer alternate ways of understanding our world.

Organized by the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, the Foundation supports this exhibition for honoring an artist who has been innovating from the 1960s to the present day and enriching the historical record of contemporary abstraction.⁠
1. Virginia Jaramillo, Zero Point, 2023. Acrylic on canvas; 60 × 60 in. © Virginia Jaramillo. Photo: Richard Gary.

2. Virginia Jaramillo ,Genesis, 1969. Acrylic on canvas; 72 × 72 in © Virginia Jaramillo. Photo: Paul Hester.

JOAN's current exhibition “Sofía Córdova: The Wreck and Not the Story of the Wreck” is the first institutional solo exhibition in LA by the Oakland/Puerto Rico-based artist. The exhibition expands on the artist’s explorations into zoological and botanical resistance to the environmental destruction by the human hand. It imagines a future landscape where flora and fauna survive and even thrive off pollution and other ravages, evolving in spite of harsh conditions. At the same time, as Córdova continually looks to Indigenous knowledge and proposes futures beyond colonial logics, she shows us the strength in collectivity and improvisation that comes in slow political movements. The exhibition closes July 20th.

The Foundation supports JOAN for supporting womxn, non-binary, BIPOC, and LGBTQIA+ artists who probe sociocultural norms and frequently work outside of the commercial art system.
Sofía Córdova, The Wreck and Not the Story of the Wreck, 2024. Installation View. Photos by Evan Walsh