“They wanted him to sign their hands, their arms, their foreheads, their clothes, and their money. They brought cases of real Campbell’s soup cans for him to autograph, old Velvet Underground records…early issues of Interview, Liz and Marilyn posters from the sixties.” - Bob Colacello [i]
Photograph by Lloyd Rule: Portrait of Andy Warhol at the Denver Art Museum, 1977. Denver Art Museum Collection: General Acquisition Fund.
Andy Warhol was a regular visitor to Colorado for almost a decade beginning in the late seventies. His visits were facilitated by the collector John Powers and his wife, Kimiko, who had substantial holdings of artworks by Warhol and other Pop artists. (The Powers Art Center in Carbondale is well worth a call anytime you’re near Aspen.)
Warhol’s first visit occurred in February 1977, when he attended the opening reception for Andy Warhol: Portraits at the Denver Art Museum. Before festivities began Lloyd Rule, the museum’s staff photographer, created an exceptional image of the artist sitting cross-legged inside a Larry Bell reflective glass sculpture, staring quizzically at three reflections of himself.
In his Diaries, Warhol notes that it was “[c]rowded at the museum. Dreadful dinner, sold Interview shirts and Philosophy books and posters… At 10:00 they let the $10 people in, they were all the freaks of Denver, a lot of cute boys and nutty girls.” [2] The following evening, more than a hundred DAM patrons paid $1,000 each to attend a fundraising dinner with the artist
Photograph by John Bonath: Andy Warhol arrives on campus. CSU Fort Collins, 1981. Courtesy of the artist.
Photograph by John Bonath: Andy Warhol and Kimiko Powers. CSU Fort Collins, 1981. Courtesy of the artist.
In 2009, Dan Jacobs and I co-curated Warhol in Colorado for the University of Denver’s Myhren Gallery. [3] The exhibition included Rule’s image and two important sets of photographs made by John Bonath and Mark Sink on September 1st, 1981. The occasion was Warhol’s second visit to Colorado, to attend the opening of Warhol at Colorado State University at the CSU Art Museum in Fort Collins. (The exhibition was part of a series of Pop Art shows at CSU sponsored by the Powers.)
Mark Sink was a student of Ruth Thorne-Thomsen at UC Denver, and his visit that day resulted in a decade-long association with Warhol and his circle in New York City. By chance he found Warhol alone in a room at CSU signing posters. Mark told him that Interview was his dream magazine; Warhol responded that he should work for them, and a month later his name was on the masthead as circulation representative for Colorado.
Photographs by Mark Sink: Andy Warhol at CSU Fort Collins, September 1981. Courtesy of the artist.
During the day Sink photographed Warhol as the artist moved around campus performing various duties like hugging a cow tethered outside the museum (an homage to the artist’s cow wallpaper), standing by one of three giant replicas of Campbell’s soup cans that had been made for the occasion, and most importantly signing autographs.
Everyone, it seemed, had brought something to be signed. Warhol records in his Diaries that a “creepy” fan asked him to sign a “big fat yellow snake.” “Christopher [Markos] freaked out and said, ‘No snakes’! I put an ‘X’ on his forehead. Because I couldn’t write, I was just too nervous with the snake.” [4]
Photograph by John Bonath: Warhol signing at CSU Fort Collins, 1981. Courtesy of the artist. The “creepy” fan with the snake can be seen at center right.
Remarkably, John Bonath was on hand at the signing table to capture the snake incident. Bonath, who is now one of Denver’s most innovative digital artists, ran the CSU photo program at the time. Working as the de facto staff photographer, he documented the entire day from Warhol’s arrival on campus to his press conference and reception, and to the line of fans clamoring for Warhol to sign commemorative silkscreen posters and whatever ephemera they’d brought with them.
He also made a remarkable image of Warhol on his rust-colored motel bed at the end of his long day, which can be seen on this blog’s Instagram feed. “He was the sweetest person you’d want to meet,” Bonath remembers of Warhol. “Wonder and awe at everything. But eye contact [with him] was strange, almost like being looked through, made invisible.” As if through a looking glass.
Mark Sink with Valere Harris Shane, NYC, 1986. Collection of Valere Harris Shane. Valere Harris Shane grew up in Denver and met Mark when she was still a teenager developing photos in the darkroom at UCD. She worked at Warhol’s Interview magazine the last two years of Warhol’s life and captured many of his New York parties and events on film. This picture was taken with her camera by her best friend. Valere started photographing punk rock bands in San Francisco in the summer of 1980, while still at East High school in 1980/81. Her photographs were published at the time in local fanzines called "Rocky Mountain Fuse" "Something Better Change" and "Local Anesthetic." She is currently working on a book of her punk photos with a local historian. Watch this space for more in future blogs!
After the signing, Mark Sink traveled back and forth from Denver to New York until he relocated back to Colorado permanently in 1991. In New York he socialized with Warhol and his entourage, opened a commercial studio, experimented with Polaroids and toy plastic cameras, and photographed artwork for a living. An exhibition of his Diana plastic camera work called 12 Nudes and a Gargoyle sold out at the Willoughby Sharp Gallery in NYC.
Photograph of John Powers and John Denver by Andy Warhol. Collection of the University of Denver.
Warhol made dozens of his own photographs during his visits to Colorado (usually to socialize with celebrities in Aspen). As Christof Heinrich notes, his images were unremarkable snapshots, no different from those of any tourist other than that they showed meetings with celebrity companions such as Yves St. Laurent, Bianca Jagger, or John Denver, who the Powers had used as an enticement for Warhol to visit Fort Collins (image at right). [5]
Warhol died in 1987 following a minor hospital procedure. His last mention of Colorado in The Warhol Diaries is slightly absurdist and replete with trivia: “So anyway, this small plane had to add fuel in Denver because a load big enough to get us to New York would’ve been too heavy to get us over the mountains, it’s a regulation. And then we stopped in Pittsburgh for a minute (candy $3). There were six seats plus the toilet seat that Benjamin sat on. Got to New York.” [6]
As always, please leave a comment or a suggestion and visit the #Colorado Photo History Instagram and Facebook pages. @coloradophotohistory. Copyright ©Rupert Jenkins.
[1] Bob Colacello. Holy Terror. New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers, 1990. 310.
[2] Pat Hackett, ed. The Andy Warhol Diaries (New York: Warner Books, 1989), 21.
[3]Warhol in Colorado, at the Victoria H. Myhren Gallery, University of Denver, January–March 2009.
[4] Hackett, Warhol Diaries, 405.
[5] Christof Heinrich, “Andy Warhol. Art Director—Amateur—Artist,” in Warhol in Colorado, exhibition catalog, 42.
[6] Dated Sunday, July 22, 1984. Hackett, Warhol Diaries, 587.