The Andy Warhol Museum is a Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, art museum dedicated primarily to the work of 20th-century American artist Andy Warhol. As an artist, Warhol worked in a variety of media, and is renowned for challenging the boundaries between fine art and popular culture. The Andy Warhol Museum houses an extremely large collection of the artist’s work, which is sometimes supplemented by temporary exhibitions of work by other artists that bear some relevance to Warhol. In addition to its galleries, the museum features a gift shop, a café, and an archive which is sometimes open to researchers.
There are two primary reasons behind the choice to establish the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. First of all, though Warhol spent most of his adult life in New York City, he was born and raised in Pittsburgh and studied design at the city’s Carnegie Institute of Technology. Secondly, the museum is managed by the Carnegie Museums, a cultural organization linked to industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie which operates four museums in Pittsburgh.
Throughout his career, Andy Warhol experimented in a variety of media, including painting, filmmaking, screenprinting, and sculpture. His brightly colored images of pop icons such as Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe as well as his renderings of mass-produced objects like soup cans are familiar to a great many people. Overall, Warhol’s work is seen by many to push the boundaries that traditionally separate fine art from mass culture.
With a collection of more than 8,000 Warhol pieces, the Andy Warhol Museum is the largest museum dedicated to a single artist in the United States. While at the museum, visitors can wander through 17 galleries, the majority of which display a rotating selection of pieces from the museum’s extensive collection. At any one time, these galleries typically feature works in several different media, such as photographs, films, and paintings. Often, Warhol’s work is supplemented by smaller, temporary exhibitions of work by artists whose output is somehow relevant to Warhol and his oeuvre.
In addition to its galleries, the Andy Warhol Museum also houses a café and a gift shop. Additionally, the museum is home to an extensive Warhol archive featuring items like scrapbooks, wigs, publicity materials, and a wide range of other objects that belonged to the artist. This archive is sometimes open to researchers. To access the archive, it is generally necessary to secure permission from museum staff in advance of one’s visit.
