Celebrating the Gift of Pop: Original Warhol Paintings, Photographs on Exhibit

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – Eleven paintings by the late pop artist Andy Warhol will be on exhibit in the Joy Pratt Markham Gallery in the Walton Arts Center from Jan. 20 through Jan. 31, 2009, along with 16 of 159 original Warhol photographs donated to the department of art at the University of Arkansas by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

Hours for this special exhibition are from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., Monday through Friday and from noon- 4 p.m. on Saturdays. The exhibit is free and open to the public.

Ten of the paintings comprise the Athletes Series of 1977 to 1978, when Warhol created portraits of the most notable athletes of the era, including Muhammad Ali, Jack Nicklaus, Pele, Chris Evert and Kareem Abdul Jabbar. They are signature examples of the artist’s work.

The eleventh painting is a portrait of art collector Richard Weisman, who is sponsoring the exhibition on behalf of the department of art in the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences.

Weisman, an avid collector of seminal works of 20^th-century pop art, met Warhol in New York. Just out of college, Weisman began his career as a collector, later helping Warhol select the athletes who would pose for the portrait series. Warhol once remarked that “the sports stars of today are the movie stars of yesterday.”

The book Picasso to Pop: The Richard Weisman Collection features not only Warhol creations, but also works by Mark Rothko, Henry Moore, Willem de Kooning, Max Ernst and Roy Lichtenstein that are a part of Weisman’s collection.

The art department was chosen as one of 183 college and university art centers in the country and the only one in Arkansas to be part of the Andy Warhol Photographic Legacy Program, which was announced in 2007 to honor the 20th anniversary of the foundation.

The nine Polaroid and seven black and white gelatin prints in the exhibit include images of the artist Keith Haring, actress Mary Tyler Moore, fashion designer Carolina Herrara and golfer Jack Nicklaus, whose photograph was likely taken as a study for the painted portrait.

“Richard Weisman’s generous loan of his paintings, combined with our recently acquired photographs, should provide visitors to the Joy Pratt Markham Gallery with a taste of what made Andy Warhol such an icon of art in the 20th century,” said Shannon Mitchell, director of the Fine Arts Center Gallery.

Jenny Moore, curator of the foundation’s Photographic Legacy Program, observed that a wealth of information about Warhol’s process and his interactions with his sitters are revealed in these images. “Often, he would shoot a person or event with both cameras, cropping one in Polaroid color as a photograph and snapping the other in black and white as a picture.”