Warhol’s Time Capsules Lend Insight
Warhol’s Time Capsules are a serial work spanning a 30 year period from early the 1960s to the late 1980s, they consists of 610 standard size cardboard boxes which Warhol, beginning around 1974 filled, sealed and sent to storage in New Jersey. There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to what made it into the time capsules, it seems like everything under the term “ephemera” was game, from photos, newspapers and magazines, to fan letters, business and personal correspondence, art work, source images for art, books, exhibition catalogues, and telephone messages, along with countless other objects.
Archivists, hired with $600,000 grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation and several other smaller grants, are sifting through all of the boxes, taking 6 years (that’s their deadline) to comb through everything. In the 18 months since the project began, the archivists have opened 177 boxes — each with an average of 400 items, some with as many as 1,200. What’s been found so far; a mummified human foot belonging to an ancient Egyptian; a piece of wedding cake from Caroline Kennedy’s wedding in 1986, a Ramones’ 45 record signed by the punk rock band’s lead singer Joey Ramone, orange nutbread sent to Warhol by one of his Pittsburgh-area cousins with a note telling him to enjoy it with a cup of coffee and an autographed picture of a naked Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.
According to an article from the CBC, “Now the spouses of the 19 heads of states and representatives of the European Union coming to Pittsburgh in September for the Group of 20 global economic summit may also get a peek at the papers, stamps, photos, gifts and nicknacks that made up Warhol’s life. ‘I would like to give them a Warhol experience,’ says Thomas Sokolowski, director of The Andy Warhol Museum, who will host the spouses for lunch during the Sept. 24-25 summit.”
6 Comments so far
I read this article in the Times this a.m.
I’d give my left nut to be able to work on this project!!!
Welcome Back JH!!
Wait. Jackie O. naked?!? What?!?
I thought you were away until after Labor Day. Missed your posts!
the andy warhol diary is one of my all time favorite bedside books. fascinating man.
Can you imagine doing anything that would command grants of $600,000 and teams of archivists working for six years to understand?
It all seems rather peculiar to me especially since I do know several people this very moment (none of which are me *grin*) with such poignant and significant stories as to command teams of researchers or at the very least our collective attention and yet they will, most likely, pass into obscurity.
Fame is a fickle phenomenon.
The man who coined the phrase, ‘In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes.’ was never satisfied with just 15 minutes, and like most artists’ his work is taking on more meaning, post mortem. I’m surprised it took curators THIS long to go through the capsules, I was under the impression that most of the ephemera had been accounted for in the collection. Frankly, I’m still fascinated by Warhol and don’t mind the funds being spent, after all he’s one of the first self made success stories of a contemporary artist coming up from a working class background rising to rule the art world. The public loves a good story, and Warhol never stopped surprising us, great fun, naked Jackie-O photos and old cake, Ha!