California Art Museum Calendar: Andy Warhol at SFMOMA through September 2, 2019

Andy Warhol From A to B And Back Again at SFMOMA

Andy Warhol (1928-1987) had a strong connection to California: it was in Los Angeles at La Cienega Boulevard’s Ferus Gallery that Warhol had his first solo show in 1962, the 32 painting series, Andy Warhol: Campbell’s Soup Cans.

Warhol’s art has returned to California, the major retrospective Andy Warhol From A to B and Back Again(organized by New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art) now occupies the fourth floor and several other galleries at the expanded San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA).  The exhibition spans Warhol’s lifetime of art making from his humble early roots as an ad illustrator to his now classic pop art phase to repetitive silkscreen portraits of celebrities to his large-scale oil paintings, made close to his untimely death.

Exhibition entrance at SFMOMA

While Warhol’s pop art Brillo boxes and Campbell soup cans may seem ubiquitous and his silk screen style often copied, the exhibition goes beyond his iconic images. Abstractions, skulls, his rarely seen body parts series and a1972 painted wall-sized portrait of Chairman Mao are special revelations. Warhol cannot be understood without his studio, know as the Factory. A short film chronicles Warhol at work with one assistant silk screening Silver Marlon, a portrait of Marlon Brando (taken from The Wild One film publicity still); in later years, he worked with dozens of assistants and few of the pieces presented are signed.

Exit through the Andy Warhol themed gift shop

 Andy Warhol From A to B and Back Again will be at SFMOMA through Sept. 2, 2019. 

The Project Room at Pasadena Museum of California Art: Nancy Baker Cahill

Pasadena Museum of California Art

From the March 2012 Los Feliz Ledger:

Nancy Baker Cahill’s artworks address the body and its inherent vulnerability. Fascinomas, her multimedia installation now on view in the Project Room at the Pasadena Museum of California Art (PMCA), was inspired, in part, by a look into an electron microscope at specimens kept at the Natural History Museum.

“Medical technology allows you to see things but not necessarily know things,” said Cahill, and that is at the heart of Fascinomas (medical terminology for an unusual case or diagnosis). Using computer animation and sound design, Cahill’s interactive installation flows between six of her paintings, projected through a large opaque scrim.


“I play with scale a little bit, so that your experience as a viewer, you are looking at something referring to something microscopic and yet you are dwarfed by it,” said Cahill. “I really wanted the viewer to be aware of their vulnerability and vulnerability of their own bodies,” she said. To create the paintings, she airbrushed pigment across objects varying from specimens of dried kelp to wire and then removed the debris leaving only telegraphed impressions. The now abstracted images are somewhat unsettling as they transition glacially from one image to the next. Fascinomas is at the Pasadena Museum of California Art, 490 E. Union St., Pasadena, now through May 20th.

Kenny Scharf's Kosmic Krylon Garage at PMCA