PITTSBURGH, PA.- The Andy Warhol Museum announces a new project and featured artist product series located in The Warhol Store. Exposures features quarterly store window displays designed by local emerging artists and limited edition items designed by local and international artists available for purchase in The Warhol Store. The first installment runs through March 1, 2015.
The series title Exposures refers to artists given the chance to showcase their work in a broad, public arena—The Warhol Store and its street-facing windows. The Warhol Store gives exposure to artists—both local and international—selling limited edition works, and the museum showcases young, emerging artists in a way similar to how a young Andy Warhol launched his career.
Honoring Warhol’s early career as a window dresser in Pittsburgh at Horne’s Department Store and in New York City at Bonwit Teller, the window displays are designed by local masters of fine arts students or recent graduates. In the 1950s, window dressing had become a rite of passage for artists in New York City; painters Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns also designed props and displays for commercial stores. For his 1961 Bonwit Teller windows, Warhol used five of his paintings based on comics and advertisements—Superman, Little King, Saturday’s Popeye, Advertisement, and Before and After (1)—as backdrops for mannequins dressed in spring dresses.
The first iteration of the window series features work by Daniel Pillis, a Pittsburgh-based artist pursuing a master’s degree in fine arts from Carnegie Mellon University. Pillis works with large-scale installation and the fetishistic and mnemonic value of objects. Taking his inspiration from Warhol’s 1948 painting Living Room, Pillis creates a three-dimensional display of the Warhola family living room from their home on Dawson Street in Pittsburgh. The window installation also features museum merchandise reminiscent of the 1940s and 1950s—vintage inspired tin toys, home goods, and ceramic milk bottles.
“We are thrilled to have an opportunity to celebrate emerging artists in Pittsburgh while also highlighting a part of Warhol’s history,” says Jessica Beck, The Warhol’s assistant curator. “This series demonstrates the importance and relevance of Warhol’s legacy to contemporary artists.”
The first selection of artist-designed objects available in The Warhol Store feature porcelains by artists Kara Walker, Alexi Morrissey, and Redraven. The objects were selected to evoke Warhol’s obsession with collectibles, most famously his cookie jars. Walker is best known for her room-size tableaux of black cut-paper silhouettes that examine the underbelly of America’s racial and gender tensions. She designed a limited edition pitcher in collaboration with Bernardaud and LizWorks in honor of her 2014 monumental installation at the Domino Sugar Factory in Brooklyn, New York. The installation—comprised of a massive, sugar-coated sphinx—represented a hybrid of racist stereotypes of black females.
Pittsburgh-based Morrissey’s most recent project, Have You Seen Me?, features small-scale milk bottles made from plaster casts, four of which are available in The Warhol Store. Using the design and process from the 1800s to 1980s U.S. dairy industry and the European obsession with imported porcelain, Morrissey blends the traditions of missing person’s ads on milk cartons with the names of African slaves from the Atlantic Slave Trade. Drawn from historical slave archives, the fictional dairies on each bottle bring the African slave trade to life by juxtaposing symbols of missing persons with the disrupted histories of African slaves.
Pittsburgh-based Redraven studios features a line of handmade porcelain keepsakes. This independent studio creates finely crafted porcelain jewelry and home décor, inspired by the sentimental value of objects. Available in The Warhol Store are cups and saucers, jewelry, and home décor.
