Celebrating the Gift of Pop

The art department was chosen as one of 183 college and university art centers in the country and the only one in Arkansas to be part of the Andy Warhol Photographic Legacy Program, which was announced in 2007 to honor the 20th anniversary of the foundation.

The Andy Warchol Foundation for the Visual Arts donated 159 original Warhol photographs to the department. In January, art collector Richard Weisman sponsored an exhibition of Warhol paintings and photographs at the Joy Pratt Markham Gallery in the Walton Arts Center. An avid collector of seminal works of 20th-century pop art, Weisman met Warhol in New York. Just out of college, Weisman began his career as a collector, later helping Warhol select the athletes who would pose for a now famous portrait series. Warhol once remarked that “the sports stars of today are the movie stars of yesterday.”

Jenny Moore, curator of the foundation’s Photographic Legacy Program, observed that a wealth of information about Warhol’s process and his interactions with his sitters are revealed in his photographs. “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.”

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