Prepare yourself for another season of provocative performance art at The Warhol.

Marc Bamuthi Joseph
The Spoken World
Saturday, January 15
A lauded spoken-word artist, slam poet, and choreographer, Marc Bamuthi Joseph commands the stage and sways the audience with his sharp, urgent, and elegant verse, passionate dancing, and stunning transformations. Co-presented with the African American Cultural Center of Greater Pittsburgh.

David Cale
A Likely Story
Saturday, February 5
All hell breaks loose as a married woman considers making Viagra brownies to seduce her neighbor; a wife’s poodle obsession gets out of hand; and two straight actors who loathe each other are cast as gay lovers in a TV movie. Solo performance artist David Cale’s tragically funny new show about people in the throws of change comes to The Warhol fresh from its Off-Broadway run.

Antony and the Johnsons
An Evening with Antony and the Johnsons
Saturday, February 26
Fusing lush and dramatic chamber pop sounds with
a torch-song cabaret sensibility, Antony and the Johnsons have risen to critical acclaim, recently participating in the 2004 Whitney Biennial. Accompanied by the adept and highly emotive performance art/chamber music ensemble the Johnsons, Antony, an androgynous diva with a sweet yet mournful tenor, sings an unearthly blues.

Marga Gomez
Marga Gomez’s Intimate Details
Saturday, March 12
With devastating one-liners, fabulous characterizations, and a pinch of smut, Marga Gomez is an openly gay Latina performance
artist and stand-up comedian who’s been described
as “hilariously trenchant in detailing a host of contemporary gay experiences and ethos...
ferocious, biting, and riotous... intensely political,
but never strident."

Nicole Blackman
Courtesan Tales
Friday, April 15, 7 p.m. – midnight
Saturday, April 16, 7 p.m. – midnight
Sunday, April 17, 3 – 8 p.m.
(Performances are by appointment only. Each performance is for one person at a time
and is approximately 10 minutes long.)

Performance artist Nicole Blackman presents her acclaimed and unique Courtesan Tales, a series of lush tales for the senses performed privately for one blindfolded audience member at a time. Blending fairy tales, lapdances, and haunted house stories,
the tales are romantic, mysterious, erotic, chilling, and nostalgic.

Funding for The Warhol's performing arts programming was provided by the James H. Beal Fund, Jack and Tally McKee Memorial Fund, and Samuel and Carrie Arnold Weinhaus Memorial Fund of The Pittsburgh Foundation.

Photo Exhibition Prompts Visitors To Reflect on Tough Issues
Inconvenient Evidence: Iraqi Prison Photographs
from Abu Ghraib

Photo: Terry Clark

As an artist, Andy Warhol took risks and challenged perceived boundaries. His work, from 1960s paintings of race riots to interpretations of the JFK assassination, also consistently reflected the issues and images of his time.

In this spirit, and in its own effort to be a forum for dialogue around contemporary subjects, The Andy Warhol Museum has organized Inconvenient Evidence: Iraqi Prison Photographs from Abu Ghraib, a small exhibition that focuses on the amateur photographs of human rights abuses that recently emerged from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

The exhibition, which opened in September to unprecedented media coverage, looks at the extraordinary impact these and other shocking images from Iraq have had on the public opinion of the U.S. war in that country. The simple presentation—computer print outs and newspaper headlines pinned to the gallery walls—prompts visitors to look at the images and ask tough questions.

“ History has the luxury of being in the past, so that events and actions which were considered dastardly in their own time might now pass as neutral or normal, ” says The Warhol’s Director, Thomas Sokolowski. “This exhibition exists in the powerful present and doesn’t allow time for repose or sanctuary. The Abu Ghraib images are stubborn facts that will not go away. I am grateful when visual imagery can provide us with a tool that might help us as human beings find resolution when no other path seems possible.”

The photographs from Abu Ghraib prison were distributed widely on the Internet and in the media, and much like the pages of a newspaper, The Warhol has presented written commentary and reflection on the exhibition as a series of “Op-Eds” that have been gathered from diverse community members. Responses from museum visitors also play a key part of the exhibition, with comments ranging from expressions of anger and shock, to inner reflection and shame.

“ Thank you for your courage in showing these pictures,” one visitor writes in the gallery comment book. “As much as it hurts me to look at them, it is a pain that must be dealt with in order to learn.” Another visitor writes, “What these images, right or wrong, do is force a mirror into the collective consciousness.”

A special poetry program related to Inconvenient Evidence will be held on November 19 in partnership with Cave Canem, an African American poets organization. Details can be found at www.warhol.org. The exhibition will be on view through November 28.

Inconvenient Evidence: Iraqi Prison Photographs from Abu Ghraib has been organized in partnership with the International Center for Photography in New York, where it is on view simultaneously.

The contents of one of Warhol’s famous cardboard boxes were uncovered for the first time at the opening of Andy Warhol’s Time Capsules in October.

Cardboard boxes lined the walls and more than 500 guests mingled in the galleries on October 2 to celebrate the opening of The Warhol’s newest exhibition, Andy Warhol’s Time Capsules. WQED’s beloved historian and documentarian, Rick Sebak, hosted the evening’s much-anticipated highlight, the opening of a new Time Capsule. The theater was packed to see Assistant Archivist Matt Wrbican and Assistant Director for Collections and Research John Smith don white gloves and open a lightweight Time Capsule labeled by Warhol, “ Miss Piggy and Halston.”

The very pop-culture contents, likely from the early 1980s, included a Miss Piggy doll, matching Miss Piggy and Kermit the Frog coffee mugs, Muppet-themed clothing, and a pair of pink Muppet Ked sneakers (size 6) signed, “To Andy, Love Halston.” All the items were in their original boxes and most were signed by Warhol’s good friend, fashion designer Halston. Although we can’t know for sure, it appears Halston gave Warhol the items as a bit of a birthday joke. Warhol, being the packrat that he was, kept them along with the more than 3,000 objects and ephemera now on view throughout the museum.

Photos: Terry Clark

Photos: Terry Clark

The Art of Collecting
Andy Warhol's Time Capsules encourage visitors to explore their own tendencies to collect.

Some people collect PEZ candy dispensers. Others go for snow domes or coins—or like Andy Warhol, anything from cookie jars to recordings of his Factory friends.

“ Everyone collects,” says Jessica Gogan, The Andy Warhol Museum’s assistant director for education and interpretation. “You collect whether you know it or not—whether it’s dust bunnies or the piling of shoes in your closet.”

In conjunction with the Andy Warhol’s Time Capsules exhibition, Gogan’s department is creating displays throughout the museum that relate to different aspects of collecting. The idea is to consider our innate tendency to gather in relation to the Time Capsules and Warhol’s propensity to document—or collect—in his artistic practice.

On the Underground level of the museum, Warhol’s habits are being examined in comparison with local contemporary artists who collect junk, detritus, and ephemera to create or inspire their own artwork. On the 5th floor, visitors are encouraged to become part of the exhibition by emptying the contents of their pockets, bag, or purse onto a photocopier and creating an image of those items to add to an ever-changing display.

In addition, every Saturday and Sunday during the Time Capsules exhibition, visitors to the Weekend Factory (noon-4 p.m.) will be invited to explore Warhol’s passion for collecting by creating a living time capsule for 2004. Visitors of all ages will have the opportunity to interact with Warhol through the website, Friendster; vote for the top personalities of 2004; silkscreen some of the most memorable images of the year; and more.

The overall goal of these projects and displays, says Gogan, is to help patrons find ways to “deepen the art experience.”

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