Big Shots: Andy Warhol Polaroids

The Nasher Museum presented an exhibition of rare Warhol photographs that revealed an important dimension of the artist’s process in creating his famous large-scale portraits. The Polaroids were Warhol’s aids for painting portraits, but in and of themselves they are significant and represent a relatively unknown body of his work.

Big Shots included about 250 Polaroids, many of famous subjects: artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, writer Truman Capote, skater Dorothy Hamill, fashion icon Bianca Jagger, artist Grace Jones, golfer Jack Nicklaus and musician Rick Ocasek. The exhibition also included 75 silver gelatin black-and-white prints taken by Warhol from 1970 to 1987, depicting such luminaries as Studio 54 owner Steve Rubell and fashion critic André Leon Talley. Many of these original prints were on public view for the first time.

The exhibition also included portraits on canvas of Patsy, Andrea, Joan and Nancy Nasher, the wife and daughters of the late Raymond D. Nasher, the museum’s namesake, accompanied by the corresponding Polaroid studies.

Big Shots was organized by the Nasher Museum, the Ackland Art Museum, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the Weatherspoon Art Museum, University of North Carolina at Greensboro. All three institutions received gifts of about 100 original Polaroid photographs and 50 gelatin silver black-and-white prints in 2008, in celebration of the 20th anniversary of the Andy Warhol Photographic Legacy Program, a division of the Andy Warhol Foundation in New York.

At the Nasher Museum, the exhibition was supported by McKinney.

Nasher visitors and staff pose for Warhol-inspired photos with exhibition T-shirts at the opening event for Big Shots: Andy Warhol Polaroids on November 12, 2009.