Hostage Crisis: Andy Warhol in Iran, at Beck Center

Sixty years ago, Iran was an ally of the US. The two countries had made deals involving nuclear technology in exchange for access to petroleum, and it was the polite remains of that relationship that led to Andy Warhol’s 1976 trip to Iran to take photos of Empress Farah Pahlavi–wife of the Shah–as reference to make a painting of her. […]

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Finding Warhol: Resurrecting a Lost Film

On a Tuesday evening in March 1964, two New York police detectives stormed into the New Bowery Theater in the city’s Lower East Side and seized a number of items, including reels of an avant-garde film, Flaming Creatures. Produced the previous year by experimental film pioneer Jack Smith, the forty-minute effort included nudity, transsexuality, and sexual situations. Just two months […]

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