Perhaps no single consumer good has become more associated with Andy Warhol than Campbell’s soup cans.
Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans, a series of 32 canvases he made in 1962, is among his earliest silkscreens and remains one of his most famous works. Actual Campbell’s soup cans are even a popular totem that Warhol devotees bring to his burial site in Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, and perch upon his gravestone in tribute.
For Pittsburgh Lego builders Tom Frost and Josh Hall, it was an obvious starting point for paying homage to one of their city’s most famous native sons.
“I think my initial idea was a lot of different smaller cans,” says Frost, an elementary school art teacher in Ambridge. “And Josh had an idea to make one monumental thing.”
Frost and Hall are members of Steel City LUG, a club of more than 700 adult Lego builders from western Pennsylvania. Their creation, Andy Warhol Soup Can and Mosaic, is on display at Carnegie Science Center as part of the Bricksburgh exhibition on the fourth floor. Half of the 34.5-inch-tall sculpture is a three-dimensional recreation of a giant soup can, and on the flat backside is a mosaic of Warhol’s 1986 Self-Portrait (Hair on End).
Their creation incorporates roughly 8,000 individual Lego bricks and took 50 hours to build. The most complicated elements, like the cursive Campbell’s logo, were sketched out on chart paper, Frost says. Otherwise, there wasn’t much preplanning involved; they just got together and started stacking bricks, figuring it out as they went along.
And as stunning as the final result is, the artists see elements they’d change. As Frost says: “That’s the great thing about Lego. It’s not glued. We can pull it apart into all of its component pieces and make something new at some point.”
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