Andy Warhol was an artistic pioneer in the movement known as pop art. He was born August 6, 1928 in Pittsburgh, PA to immigrant parents from what is now known as Slovakia.
He had a successful career as a commercial artist and was proficient at variety of artistic mediums including painting, sculpture and advertisement. During the 1960s Warhol gained notoriety for painting such things as the Campbell’s Soup Cans, Coca Cola bottles and celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Troy Donahue, Muhammad Ali and Elizabeth Taylor. During his life Andy Warhol’s work was both popular and controversial. Warhol passed away on February 22, 1987 after experiencing complications from gallbladder surgery.
About 2 ½ years after his death a museum was planned to honor the life and work of Andy Warhol in the city of Pittsburgh. The Andy Warhol museum was opened on May 13-14, 1994 and attracted over 25,000 visitors. It is housed in an 88,000 square foot former industrial warehouse. It contains 17 galleries that feature over 900 paintings and close to 2,000 works on paper. It also has over 1,000 published unique prints, 77 sculptures, 4,000 photographs as well as over 4,350 Warhol films and videotaped works.
The museum also has a rather large collection of Warhol's "time-capsules", which are boxed records of the artist's day-to-day dealings and his fondness for collecting. It is also home to the best collection of archives that document the life of Andy Warhol. The archives are available for research to scholars and the general public in the Archives Study Center.
It is one of four Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh and has an extensive traveling exhibitions program. The program has been loaning Warhol’s artwork to museums around the world. It has enabled Warhol’s work to be seen in 36 countries by over 9 million people.
WEBSITE
http://www.warhol.org/
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