More than twenty-five years after his death, Andy Warhol (1928-1987) remains one of the most influential figures in contemporary art and culture. His life and work have inspired artists, writers, photographers, and filmmakers, and his own personal cultivation of the art of celebrity has left a legacy on the world to this day. His famous remark that "in the future everyone will be world famous for fifteen minutes" continues to leave its impression on our fame-obsessed world today, from reality TV to Twitter and YouTube.

In 2008 Columbia University received the generous donation of 106 Polaroids and 50 black-and-white silver gelatin prints from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts as part of their Photographic Legacy Program. This gift added significantly to the hundreds of other fine art photographs in the collections of Art Properties. Most of the Polaroids were used by Warhol as the basis for his portrait paintings of celebrities, royalty, art collectors, drag queens, and others, produced during the 1970s and 1980s. The black-and-white prints are more documentary in nature, revealing aspects of Warhol’s daily life around the world. In 2014 the Foundation extended this gift with the donation of 6 large screen prints. For these works, Warhol appropriated the photographs of others to create new interpretations of old images so as to make them original works once again.

The Warhol photographs and prints are available for consultation by Columbia students, faculty, staff, and outside researchers, for classroom and research purposes. To schedule an appointment with Art Properties to see these works, email artproperties@library.columbia.edu.

Consult this list of photographs and prints by Warhol for more details about what is in the Art Properties collection.

On Friday, April 4, 2014, Columbia University celebrated Warhol and his legacy of fame with a day-long exhibition of his photography and a public program entitled 15 Minutes: Andy Warhol’s Photographic Legacy. The image seen here is an installation view of the exhibition of works from the collection of Art Properties, which was curated by Roberto C. Ferrari, Curator of Art Properties. The exhibition and public program coincided with the Brant Foundation’s traveling Andy Warhol exhibition and the School of the Arts 1st Year MFA Exhibition, curated by Deborah Cullen, Director and Chief Curator at The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery.

An afternoon round-table discussion of Warhol specialists included: Neil Printz, Blake Gopnik, Larissa Harris, and Tom Kalin. Each panelist shared in 15 minutes aspects of Warhol that pertain to their own work, including larger themes of glamour, celebrity, portraiture, and desire. Concluding the evening was an artist’s talk by Swiss-born contemporary artist Urs Fischer on Andy Warhol.

This one-day exhibition outside the Wallach Art Gallery (then located in Schermerhorn Hall on the 8th floor) and public program were organized by Columbia University School of the Arts,  Art Properties in Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery, and the Department of Art History & Archaeology, in conjunction with The Brant Foundation Art Study Center.