Warhol collection at Queens College

Queens College is now home to a large collection of Andy Warhol’s artwork. The Godwin-Ternbach Museum at Queens College received 150 of Warhol’s Polaroid snapshots and gelatin silver prints from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts last month, said Amy Winter, director of the Godwin-Ternbach Museum.
Winter called the donation “very prestigious for the university and the community.”
The Godwin-Ternbach Museum was one of 183 institutions selected to receive a gift from the foundation’s Andy Warhol Photographic Legacy Program. This program has donated more than 28,000 pieces of art by Warhol worth more than $28 million.
The newly-acquired pieces of art, however, will not be on display for at least a year, according to Winter, who said that right now, they are being catalogued and framed.
The museum already has a substantial Warhol collection, including original first edition posters, “Campbell’s Soup,” a limited edition “Campbell’s Soup” which is rainbow-colored and his “Electric Chair” series.
“To hold two full series itself is pretty significant,” Winter said. “Of all the pop artists, he [Warhol] was the one that became most famous.”
The art that the museum has just received includes photographs of many celebrities, including clothing designer Diane von Furstenberg, artist Georgia O’Keeffe, and hockey superstar Wayne Gretzky.
“His subject matter was images of his friends, people that were his patrons, people that he made famous,” Winter said. She added that these people “have become icons” because of Warhol.
Winter said that having such a large collection of Warhol’s art would help better understand the artist and his material.
She said that he made art popular and “brought it into the larger world by fusing photos and advertising, using print instead of oil and paint [and] using pop imagery… this is what makes him so important.”