On view April 8 – May 27, 2018 Opening reception on Sunday, April 8, 2018 from 1:00p.m. – 4:00p.m.
ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, NY, March 2018 – Warhol: Unidentified presents eighty-three photographs by Andy Warhol whose subjects are currently unidentified. These photographs were gifted to CCS Bard in 2008 by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts as part of the Andy Warhol Photographic Legacy Program through which American museums received troves of under-recognized works. Warhol: Unidentified is part of Warhol x 5, a collaboration of five Hudson Valley university art museums that have coordinated to present complimentary exhibitions around on Warhol in 2018. The exhibition takes places in the Collection Teaching Gallery at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College.
The gift that CCS Bard received includes images of well-known figures like Bella Abzug, Cheryl Tiegs, Dorothy Hamill, and Sitting Bull, artists Joseph Beuys, Francesco Clemente, and Julian Schnabel, as well as the institution’s founder Marieluise Hessel, but the curatorial team chose to focus on the images of unidentified people. Alex Kitnick, part of a team of faculty and staff who organized the exhibition wrote: “We look at these unidentified images differently than celebrity portraits. Though Warhol once claimed that ‘everybody looks alike and acts alike’ celebrity, certainly a name, sets people apart. The label ‘unidentified’ has an air of mystery or unreality about it; one might think of Unidentified Flying Objects, or hear a wisp of criminality (consider unidentified assailants or victims). For Warhol, these unidentified people who possessed a secret power: ‘When you just see somebody on the street, they can really have an aura,’ he once wrote. Indeed, there is an erotics of the unknown and the unspoken.”
The “Unidentified” photographs will be shown alongside eight photomechanical prints of legendary portraits and images from the 1970 Multiples, Inc. publication, Artists and Photographs by Lawrence Alloway, which come from CCS Bard’s own holdings of Warhol’s work.
Warhol: Unidentified is organized by Marcia Acita, Director of Exhibitions and Operations, CCS Bard; Lauren Cornell, Director of Graduate Program and Chief Curator, CCS Bard; and Alex Kitnick, Brant Family Fellow in Contemporary Art, Bard College.
Participating institutions in Warhol x 5 are The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at the State University of New York at New Paltz, the Neuberger Museum, Purchase College, State University of New York, and the University Art Museum, University at Albany, State University of New York.