Friends & Frenemies
The LSU Museum of Art's latest exhibition explores the era of Warhol
The imagery of Andy Warhol’s vibrant, iconic prints stands out as large and bright against the backdrop of modern American culture as the pop artist’s persona itself. “He would have been an amazing social media star today. I guess he was like the original influencer,” mused Michelle Schulte, chief curator and director of programs at the LSU Museum of Art. “Because he understood the power of media. And he understood the power of being famous, and how he could make himself famous. And he was great at it.”
This world where art and personality inextricably combine and magnify one another is where we find Warhol’s larger-than-life career, as well as the LSU Museum of Art’s new exhibition Andy Warhol / Friends & Frenemies: Prints from the Cochran Collection. In addition to over thirty large-scale Warhol prints, including the entirety of his “Myths” and “Cowboys and Indians” portfolios, Friends and Frenemies features over sixty other works by contemporaries of Warhol, who were also active participants in the major shifts the “Me Generation'' was causing in contemporary art and culture between 1960 and the late 1990s.
Amidst the context of the Civil Rights Movement, Gay Rights Movement, Indigenous Movement, second wave of feminism, and other activism that arose at the time of America entering the Vietnam War—all against the backdrop of rising consumerism—American artists were hungry to shake up the notion of what art was expected to be. “I think it goes in with that whole time of turbulence. If you think about it, they actually just turned the art world over,” Schulte said. “And they pushed the bounds of what we consider art. And Andy Warhol was like, great at it.”
The works in the exhibition are on loan from the collection of Wesley and Missy Cochran, who have devoted their lives to supporting artists and amassing an impressive assortment of twentieth century artworks. Besides the Warhol prints, the exhibition includes woodblocks, etchings, lithographs, serigraphs, film, and more by artists that include Roy Lichtenstein, Helen Frankenthaler, Robert Rauschenberg, and Willem de Kooning.
“[Warhol] would have been an amazing social media star today. I guess he was like the original influencer,” —Michelle Schulte, executive director of the LSU Museum of Art
“I really wanted it to stay true to sort of this idea that they all knew each other,” Schulte explained. “All of these artists were aware of one another … and there are artists in the show that actively worked alongside Andy Warhol.”
The concept of “Friends and Frenemies” came from this notion, of Warhol being contextualized amongst the art of his contemporaries who worked in similar styles of pop art, expressionism, and abstract art; often partying alongside him in New York City. “[Warhol] was such a big celebrity artist in the ‘70s, that sometimes he overshadows some of the others, but it was also this beautiful generation and epoch of these artists who were celebrities. Sort of like rock stars of today, it's kind of interesting that in the ‘70s, we were putting artists up on pedestals, and they were making magazine covers, and we were talking about them,” Shulte said. “That's what makes that era so special to me, and so I really wanted to show work from it.”