Posted by vrcvanderbilt on Tuesday, January 9, 2018 in Events, Fine Arts Gallery, HART, News, VRC.

The Vanderbilt Fine Arts Gallery features two winter exhibitions, FAMOUS! (and not-so-famous): Polaroids by Andy Warhol, and Looking Back (Looking Forward): The Black Mountain Experience, in Cohen Memorial Hall, with an opening reception scheduled for Thursday, January 11, from 5 to 7 pm. Free and open to the public, both exhibitions will remain on view through March 2, with a January 15 closure for Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

From 1970 to 1987, Andy Warhol took scores of Polaroid and black-and-white photographs, the vast majority of which were never seen by the public. These images often served as the basis for his commissioned portraits, silk-screen paintings, drawings, and prints. Some began as magazine assignments (many for his editors at Interview), album covers for musical artists such as The Rolling Stones, The Velvet Underground, and Debbie Harry, or advertising campaigns, including those for Absolut Vodka. In 2007, to commemorate its twentieth anniversary, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts launched the Andy Warhol Photographic Legacy Program. Designed to afford the broader public greater access to Warhol’s photographs, the program donated more than 28,500 of Warhol’s original Polaroids and gelatin silver prints to college and university museums and galleries across the country. Each institution received a curated selection of more than one hundred Polaroids and fifty black-and-white prints.

The exhibit represents the largest selection of Warhol’s Polaroids presented to date from the gallery’s collection of 104 works. A number of black and white photographs that reveal the more private side of Warhol’s life and his circle of friends are included in the exhibition. In order to help illustrate Warhol’s working methods, a large-scale screenprint, also donated by the Andy Warhol Foundation, and models of Polaroid cameras like the ones that he used, will be on view.

As the exhibition’s title suggests, the wide range of subjects including famous people—such legends as Dolly Parton, O. J. Simpson, Bianca Jagger, and Georgia O’Keeffe—and less famous people reveals that anyone who was prepared to pay cash for a private commission could be immortalized by Warhol, many of them attempting to elevate their own status by association with the artist himself. More than simply a record of the sitter, photography was a central tool for Warhol to create identity, with the medium often linked to celebrity in such a way that it became part of the process in validating fame.

The second in a three part series on portraiture, FAMOUS! (and not-so-famous): Polaroids by Andy Warhol is organized by the Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery and curated by Joseph Mella, director, with support provided by the Dr. and Mrs. E. William Ewers Gift for Fine Arts.

From its inception, Black Mountain College was an incubator for experimentation, placing the importance of an integrated liberal arts education at its center. This innovative school, founded in 1933 in North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains, valued equally the visual arts and the so-called applied arts, along with poetry, music, and dance. Looking Back (Looking Forward): The Black Mountain Experience draws on the combined visual resources of the Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery and Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center.

The exhibition features a selection of vintage photographs taken at Black Mountain College of John Cage, Merce Cunningham, and R. Buckminster Fuller, all central figures in mid-twentieth-century avant-garde music, dance, and culture, along with works of art by them and others associated with the groundbreaking school, including Josef Albers, Robert Rauschenberg, and Kenneth Snelson. Additionally, one of the few surviving films from the era, a silent movie of the dancer Katherine Litz performing her work, Thoughts Out of Season (ca. 1952) will continually be screened in the gallery.

Looking Back (Looking Forward): The Black Mountain Experience is presented in conjunction with the spring semester course, The Experimental Arts of Black Mountain, taught by John Warren, Department of Art, and supported by the Department of Art and the Dr. and Mrs. E. William Ewers Gift for Fine Arts Fund.

For more information about the gallery, call 615.322-0605 or visit vanderbilt.edu/gallery.  Visitors to the opening reception may park, free of charge, anywhere in Lot 95, accessible from 21st Avenue South.

*Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987) Dolly Parton, 1985, Polacolor ER, 4 1/4 x       3 3/8 inches, Gift of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

**Hazel Larsen Archer (American, 1921-2001), Merce Cunningham at Black Mountain College, ca. 1952-1953, gelatin silver print, 8 1/2 x 5 3/4 inches, Courtesy of the Estate of Hazel Larsen Archer and Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center.