Warhol Fans Celebrate His Birthday With Soup Cans, Screen Tests

Tags: Commemorations, Interactive Art, Pittsburgh, Social Media, Warhol, Warhol Museum

Yesterday was Andy Warhol‘s birthday– he would have been 84 years old– and to commemorate his death, many sentimental fans stopped by his grave in Pennsylvania to leave cans of soup.

Artist Madelyn Roehrig, who has been documenting the artist’s grave for the past 4 years, notes that the most common commemoration is Campbell’s soup.

“Sometime there are so many soup cans up there, there’s like two rows of them,” she says. ”Mainly tomato, and chicken noodle, and all the varieties of chicken noodle. Now you’re getting low fat, low salt. And then some of the competition,” she adds. “Cup-O’-Noodles show up every once in a while, and it kind of stands out, you know. I don’t know why somebody would want to do that, but they do.”

Warhol was buried in the same cemetery as his parents, about 20 miles outside of Pittsburgh, where he was born. It is said he desired only one word on his grave– “Figment.” (Visitors can attest that his supposed wish was not granted.)

Meanwhile, The Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh celebrated the artist’s birthday with an announcement: the launch of an interactive screen test for museum visitors.

Between 1964 and 1966, Warhol ran screen tests in his Factory of some of the world’s most famous individuals: Salvador Dalí, Edie Sedgwick & Dennis Hopper, to name a few. He would ask the sitter to pose for 3 minutes– the length of one film reel– and would then run the video in slow motion to imbue it with “a dreamlike stillness.”

Visitors to the museum can now engage in the same experience, in a gallery set up to mimic the Factory with a specially modified vintage camera and twin studio lights. The completed video can be shared with various social media sites.

[via NPR]

Photo courtesy of NPR