Realizing Andy Warhol: Revelation

Author: Kenneth Wahrenberger, Milton Fine Museum Profession Fellow at The Andy Warhol Museum – Summer 2019

After innumerable hours of planning, writing, and curating, Andy Warhol: Revelation will open October 20, 2019 at The Andy Warhol Museum. The show explores the Byzantine and Roman Catholic influences on Warhol’s artistic production from his earliest known works all the way to his Last Supper series completed at the end of his life. 

In May of 2018, I had my first meeting with José Carlos Diaz, the chief curator of The Warhol and organizer of Andy Warhol: Revelation. At that time, José was working on the exhibition with Micol Forti, the director of the Contemporary Art Collection at the Vatican Museums. The exhibition was planned to open in conjunction with the museum’s twenty-fifth anniversary in October 2019. In addition to its Pittsburgh premier, the show and will travel to the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky. 

We worked in earnest throughout the late summer and fall of 2018, finding every possible text related to the artist’s clandestine religious practices and Byzantine Catholic upbringing. After developing a solid research base, we began sorting the exhibition checklist into sections and drafting preliminary floorplans (and looking back, they are astonishingly different than what they are today!).

In January of this year, José and I began working on the Revelation exhibition catalogue, which ended up being a source of joy (and frustration) until the end of my Fine Foundation Fellowship in late August when the book went to print. The catalogue consists of two scholarly essays, one from Jose and one from Miranda Lash, curator of contemporary art at the Speed Art Museum, a forward from The Warhol director Patrick Moore, section texts describing each part of the show, a selection of high quality plates of works in the show, and a comprehensive exhibition checklist. Suffice it to say, the 96-page catalogue required a remarkable amount of editing, fact checking, and drafting, which occupied my time for the last six months. 

I was fortunate to work with a marvelous copy editor named Tom Fredrickson and a talented graphic design team from Glue + Paper Workshop. Of course, they were not Warhol scholars and could not help fact check many aspects of the text. I can remember spending weeks culling the exhibition checklist and working with the archival and collections teams to provide names, dates, mediums, dimensions, etc. to certain items in the show. One of the most extraordinary parts of Revelation is that it will exhibit rare and never-before-seen objects like icon panels from Warhol’s childhood church and the original source material for his Last Supper silkscreen series; however, these objects also present new issues of titling, dating, and artistic attribution, which are important to determine for a publication. While this was an complicated process for me, the team at The Warhol was extremely helpful and turned every challenge into a fruitful, educational experience.  

At the end of the Fine Foundation Fellowship and my previous internship engagement at the Warhol, I have the experience of managing a book project from start to finish, along with heavy involvement in researching and curating a major exhibition with a brilliant curator. Although I am anxious for the public response after the show opens, I think people will be amazed or at the very least intrigued by this mysterious side of Andy Warhol.