Andy Warhol’s Business Art with Anthony E. Grudin, Alex J. Taylor, and Blake Gopnik

In conjunction with the exhibition Adman: Warhol Before Pop, Anthony E. Grudin, assistant professor of art history at The University of Vermont, reads from his 2017 publication Warhol’s Working Class: Pop Art and Egalitarianism, which explores Andy Warhol’s creative engagement with social class. During the 1960s, Warhol’s work appropriated images, techniques, and technologies that have long been described as generically “American” or “middle class.” Alex J. Taylor, assistant professor and academic curator at the University of Pittsburgh, will present new research on Warhol’s now iconic canvases of Campbell’s Soup cans and his engagement in the 1960s with corporations, specifically, America’s burgeoning packaged food industry.

Following the reading, Blake Gopnik, Warhol biographer and New York-based art critic, leads a Q&A focusing on the points of intersection between Grudin’s latest book, research, and the themes of the exhibition Adman: Warhol Before Pop.

Anthony E. Grudin received his B.A. in Art History from Reed College and his Ph.D. in Art History from the University of California, Berkeley, where he had a Javits Fellowship. Prior to his position at UVM, he taught at Berkeley and the California College of the Arts, and developed classes on modern and postmodern art, curatorial practice, the methods and theories of Art History, relationships between art and athletics, and the persistence of the Kantian notion of disinterest in the aesthetic sphere.

Alex J. Taylor is a historian of modern American art and visual culture. His research interests include transnational modernisms, studio practice, artistic self-fashioning, patronage, consumer cultures, and the intersections between art, politics and capitalism. Taylor was the inaugural Terra Foundation Research Fellow in American Art at Tate, where he led the Refiguring American Art initiative. Before shifting his focus to American art, Taylor spent a decade working as an arts administrator, critic and curator in Australia. He held key roles at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image and Experimenta Media Arts, and as a board member and chair of National Exhibition Touring Support (Victoria).

Blake Gopnik is an American art critic who lives in New York City. He is critic-at-large for Artnet News and writes on art and design for a wide range of publications. Gopnik is currently at work on a comprehensive biography of Andy Warhol.

Co-presented with the Department of History of Art and Architecture, University of Pittsburgh.