The Andy Warhol Museum

The Andy Warhol Museum on the North Shore occupies a seven-storey former warehouse and holds the most comprehensive collection of Warhol's work in existence: paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, films, sculpture, and an extraordinary archive of source material. There is nothing like it. The collection is arranged chronologically, taking you from his Pittsburgh childhood and early commercial illustration work through the Factory years, the celebrity portraits, the Disaster series, and the late religious paintings. The sheer volume of the work is staggering.

The museum's collection includes more than 900 paintings, 100 sculptures, 4,000 photographs, and 4,500 drawings. The film and video archive is particularly remarkable: Warhol was a prodigious filmmaker and many of his screen tests and early films are shown here in dedicated viewing rooms. Allow at least three hours. The museum is closed Mondays; check the website for hours and the current exhibition programme, which supplements the permanent collection with substantial temporary shows.

things to do museum
A story
Andy Warhol was born Andrew Warhola in Pittsburgh in 1928, the son of Carpatho-Rusyn immigrants from what is now Slovakia. He grew up in Oakland and attended Carnegie Tech (now Carnegie Mellon). He kept his Pittsburgh origins carefully ambiguous throughout his New York career — but his studio, the Factory, recycled the assembly-line aesthetics he'd grown up around in a steel city, and his obsession with celebrity and mass production was, in retrospect, entirely Pittsburgh.

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