Big Shots: Andy Warhol Polaroids
Nasher exhibition features nearly 250 Polaroids by Warhol
Friday, October 30, 2009
Andy Warhol bought a Polaroid Big Shot around 1970.
The gray plastic camera had just one button to push and no settings to adjust except for a ring on the lens for light and dark. The Big Shot, with a focal length fixed at three feet, was ideal for Warhol to use as studies for his famous portraits on canvas.
A new exhibition at Duke’s Nasher Museum of Art, “Big Shots: Andy Warhol Polaroids,” provides insight into the artist’s use of the camera. The show, which starts on Thursday, Nov. 12, includes nearly 250 Polaroids and 75 silver gelatin black-and-white prints Warhol took between 1970 and 1987. Many of them are on public display for the first time.
“Warhol’s Polaroids reveal an important dimension of the artist’s process in creating his famous large-scale portraits,” says Trevor Schoonmaker, curator of contemporary art at the Nasher. “Although the Polaroids were aids for painting portraits, in and of themselves they are significant and represent a relatively unknown body of Warhol’s work.”
The exhibition includes Warhol’s Polaroids of celebrities including Bianca Jagger, Dorothy Hamill and Truman Capote. In addition, it includes large portraits on canvas of the wife and daughters of the late Raymond D. Nasher, the museum’s namesake, accompanied by the corresponding Polaroid studies. Lectures about Warhol’s Polaroids and a selection of Warhol films from the 1960s will also be part of the exhibition, to provide greater context for the photographic work.
The exhibit is organized by and will appear through 2011 at the Nasher Museum of Art, the Weatherspoon Art Museum at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and the Ackland Art Museum at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. All three institutions received gifts of nearly 100 original Polaroid photographs and 50 gelatin silver black-and-white prints in 2008, in celebration of the 20th anniversary of the Andy Warhol Photographic Legacy Program, a division of the Andy Warhol Foundation in New York.
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Exhibition: Big Shot: Andy Warhol Polaroids
Begins Thursday, Nov. 12
Admission is free for Duke faculty, staff and students; $5 for non-Duke adults; free for children 17 and under; free for museum members.
Information: nasher.duke.edu/exhibitions_warhol.php
