Remember Andy Warhol’s “Time Capsules?” This serial work, spanning a thirty-year period from the early 1960s to the late 1980s, consists of 610 standard sized cardboard boxes, which Warhol, beginning in 1974, filled, sealed and sent to storage. Warhol used these boxes to manage a bewildering quantity of material that routinely passed through his life. Photographs, newspapers and magazines, fan letters, business and personal correspondence, art work, source images for art-work, books, exhibition catalogues, and telephone messages, along with objects and countless examples of ephemera, such as announcements for poetry readings and dinner invitations, were placed on an almost daily basis into a box kept conveniently next to his desk. Tom Sokolowski, Director of the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, recently sent me a note asking for donations to support the project. He’s asking for $5000 per capsule, which would pay for the documentation, archival processing and cataloging, scanning every object (and digital photography of large objects) and properly re-housing each item in acid-free folders and Mylar sleeves. “Once the cataloging is complete,” Sokolowski writes, “we’ll be able to to start really researching what we’ve found and, eventually, put the entire Time Capsules collection on the web, so everyone can access it.” Perhaps ten of your friends could each donate $500? Or fifty friends $100 each? Here’s a video from the opening of Capsule #91.
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