Warhol & Friends

The University Art Museum is thrilled to announce Warhol & Friends, a group exhibition showcasing artwork by Andy Warhol and his contemporaries. In addition to Warhol, the exhibition highlights significant artists such as Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Sol LeWitt, Cindy Sherman, and Fritz Scholder. The exhibition will include loaned artworks from Art Bridges Foundation, the Tucson Museum of Art, and works from the NMSU Permanent Art Collection.

Warhol & Friends engages with the diverse legacies of the Pop Art movement throughout its historical period and contemporary visual culture. Viewers will encounter select silkscreen and photographic works by Andy Warhol as a nexus for understanding Pop Art’s responses to postwar American art and society, its interactions with other concurrent art movements, and its lasting influence on artists and audiences today. This group exhibition examines “popular art” as a visual and material investigation of themes related to artistic authorship, repetition, representation, appropriation, and collaboration. Alluring and glamorous, Warhol & Friends transforms the Bunny Conlon Modern & Contemporary Art Gallery, inviting viewers to contemplate the relationship of images and the everyday world. This exhibition is curated by Dr. Jess Ziegenfuss, in collaboration with NMSU Art Museum Collections Curator Courtney Uldrich, with curatorial support from NMSU undergraduate student MJ Yurcic.

Andy Warhol’s name has become synonymous with the Pop Art movement as a leading visual artist and filmmaker. His art explores the impact of celebrity culture and advertising, which flourished in the 1960s. In this rapidly growing art movement, Warhol’s subjects—whether celebrities, historical figures, or endangered animals—became integral parts of his practice. Forging collaboration with other artists was ingrained in Warhol’s art making practices, expanding his reach, and cementing his role as an artist whose work continues to influence future generations. His impact extended into the fashion world, music, and TV entertainment, making him an iconic symbol of pop culture over the past 70+ years. Warhol has, in many ways, shaped the present understanding of art’s constant prevalence in society and culture.

About The Andy Warhol Foundation
In 2008 the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts honored the 20th anniversary of the Warhol Foundation by making substantial gifts of Warhol’s photographic works to select universities and colleges across the United States. The NMSU Art Museum was the recipient of one of these gifts and now stewards 158 of Warhol’s photographs, and screen prints as part of the NMSU Permanent Art Collection.
More information about the Andy Warhol Photographic Legacy Project can be found on their website at warholfoundation.org.

About Art Bridges Foundation
Art Bridges Foundation is the vision of philanthropist and arts patron Alice Walton. Since 2017, Art Bridges has created and supported projects that bring outstanding works of American art out of storage and into communities across the United States and its territories. Art Bridges partners with a growing network of more than 240 museums of all sizes on nearly 900 projects—impacting 5.3 million people nationwide—to provide financial and strategic support for exhibitions, collection loans, and programs designed to educate, inspire, and deepen engagement with local communities. For more information, visit artbridgesfoundation.org.

About the curator:
Dr. Jess Ziegenfuss is assistant professor of art history at Texas A&M International University. Her scholarship focuses on modern and contemporary art, visual studies, and critical theory, with specific interests in political ecology, environmental aesthetics, materiality, scale and spatiality, process-based art, and site-specificity. She is also an art critic and independent curator who has conducted virtual and in-person exhibition projects in association with collections of photography, art, and ephemera.

Acknowledgements:
Warhol & Friends at NMSU was made possible in part with support from The Mellon Foundation; The Carl & Marilynn Thoma Foundation; NMSU College of Arts & Sciences; The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; and Art Bridges Foundation.