Taking on Warhol

The Museum of Art added six Andy Warhol prints to their already vast collection of his work, totaling 174 prints.

The prints were received on Oct. 8, and include a colorful depiction of a semi-truck, Sitting Bull and a liquor store receipt, among others.

“Normally you would have to go to Seattle to see something like this. To be able to see such high caliber of work here is pretty amazing,” said Museums of Art Assistant Curator Zach Mazur. “We’re certainly on the right path to becoming a beacon for the arts.”

Anna-Maria Shannon, associate director of the Museum of Art, said the museum acquired the prints through the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

“The foundation has been giving away works from their permanent collection,” Shannon said. “WSU is part of a group of university and private museums receiving work from the foundation. We now have six more and these are large prints and are absolutely stunning works.”

Debby Stinson, public relations marketing manager, said Sitting Bull is one of her favorite Warhol pieces.

“I personally love this one because it has a deep, profound meaning behind a very light, colorful, rich humorous actual piece of art,” she said. “You have that deepness or that richness of character in the person itself, but then you have this really light portrayal.”

Stinson said she appreciates Warhol’s work because of the emotional response each piece elicits in his audience.

“One of the things I love about the truck is the color, and it reminds me of being a little kid and playing with matchbox cars,” she said. “I think really good art, the stuff that people remember their whole lives, generates from an emotional response. And that’s why I love these two.”

Warhol as a pop artist would take ideas from popular culture, remove them from the original context and mix them with other unrelated ideas.

“You take a liquor store receipt, blow it up, bring attention to it, put it in a gallery somewhere and all of a sudden we’re viewing this in a different situation,” he said. “Pop art is about taking original meaning and changing it, to reinterpret the original context into a new meaning.”

Other times pop art is meant to merely confuse the viewers, and sometimes the artist might not even know what he/she is trying to get across.

Mazur said Warhol drew his inspiration from those around him.

“He would hang out with movie stars and musicians, so they became the subject of a lot of his artwork,” he said. “But often times with pop art, we don’t know the why behind it.”

The new prints are more familiar to viewers and will bring more awareness to Warhol’s variation of work, he said.

“Those images we already have, people haven’t seen them before,” Mazur said. “Stuff like this is going to be a little more recognizable, at least in terms of style, so it brings a more balance to what we do have for Warhol.”

Though the prints reside in the museum, they will not be shown to the public until at least summer 2014.

Mazur believes that this will not be the last of Warhol works the museum will receive, and predicts that the museum will continue its artistic growth.