PITTSBURGH -- Two special exhibits on view until August make it clear that the Andy Warhol Museum isn't resting on its namesake's legacy.
Both "Mixed Signals: Artists Consider Masculinity in Sports" and "Contemporary Magic: A Tarot Deck Art Project" fit the spirit of the Warhol, a seven-story structure that also exhibits generous selections of Warhol's art from throughout his career. (The artist was born in a Pittsburgh row house and graduated from Carnegie Institute of Technology, now Carnegie-Mellon University, before heading to fame and fortune in New York.) The museum is on the city's North Shore.
The traveling "Mixed Signals" exhibit with work from 17 artists strives to break down stereotypes and assumptions about the masculine athlete.
Hank Willis Thomas' conceptual pieces all but accost the viewer, particularly "Scarred Chest" (2003) . The Nike swoosh is scarred on the brown chest of a male athlete nine times. This image will click instantly with anyone who thinks the shoe company has too much power in the sports world.
In Kori Newkirk's "Closely Guarded" (2000), the nets of two basketball hoops, apparently at regulation height, have been extended all the way down to the floor with artificial hair and plastic pony beads. Catherine Opie's photographs of high school football players, such as "Josh" (2007), show young males just learning how to confront or accept the cameras, and the gazes, that will follow them through their sports careers.
This iteration of the traveling exhibit is an expanded version of an exhibit organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
A fanciful tarot deck
For "Contemporary Magic," Stacy Engman, curator of New York's National Arts Club, commissioned 78 artists and fashion designers to each design one of the cards in a tarot deck, without any requirement to refer to one another.
Shoe designer Christian Louboutin gives us a slinky model on the Nine of Cups surrounded by sky-high heels as well as cups. Yoshitomo Nara's drawn Four of Swords presents a wide-eyed tyke brandishing one of the swords as if he or she knows how to use it.
In addition to cognates of the cards in a standard poker deck, a tarot deck also includes the symbol-heavy 22 cards in the Major Arcana, such as The Fool, The Moon, Death and Temperance. Fittingly, Warhol himself turns up as the spooky Hanged Man card. In the Rider-Waite tarot deck, The Hanged Man is a blond male hanging upside down by one foot from a T-shaped tree. In Engman's exhibit and deck, The Hanged Man is a 1985 Patrick McMullan photo of the pale-haired Warhol, standing next to his "Invisible Sculpture" - turned upside down. "The card's themes are archetypal of Warhol's approach to unexpected and unique revelations," curator Engman told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in an interview.
