ByGeorge!

January 2008

Luther W. Brady Art Gallery to Receive Warhol Photographs


The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts has donated 150 original Polaroid photographs and gelatin silver prints to GW.

GW’s Luther W. Brady Art Gallery will soon be home to 150 original Polaroid photographs and gelatin silver prints by Andy Warhol, thanks to an unprecedented gift from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. In honor of its 20th anniversary, the foundation is donating a total of 28,543 original Warhol photographs valued in excess of $28 million to 183 college and university art museums.

“We are so excited to be receiving this gift of photographs from the Warhol Foundation,” says Lenore D. Miller, director of University art galleries and chief curator of the Brady Gallery. “We have been steadily increasing our holdings in photography, and now with the recent establishment of the Francine Zorn Trachtenberg Photography Fund and this substantial gift of Warhol photographs, we are poised to research, produce, and bring more exhibits of photography to The George Washington University and Foggy Bottom communities.”

According to foundation President Joel Wachs, the aim of the Andy Warhol Photographic Legacy Program is to provide greater access to Warhol’s artwork and process and to enable a wide range of people across the country to view and study this relatively unknown body of Warhol’s work. In the foundation’s 20-year history, it has given away more than $200 million in cash grants and art donations.

“A wealth of information about Warhol’s process and his interactions with his sitters is revealed in these images,” says Jenny Moore, curator of the Photographic Legacy Program. “Through his rigorous—though almost unconscious—consistency in shooting, the true idiosyncrasies of his subjects were revealed. Often, he would shoot a person or event with both cameras, cropping one in Polaroid color as a ‘photograph’ and snapping the other in black and white as a ‘picture.’ By presenting both kinds of images side by side, the Photographic Legacy Program allows viewers to move back and forth between moments of Warhol’s ‘art,’ ‘work,’ and ‘life’—inseparable parts of a fascinating whole.”



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