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Gallery 851

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Outtake from Andy Warhol and members of the Factory: Gerard Malanga, poet; Viva, actress; Paul Morrissey, director; Taylor Mead, actor;  Brigid Polk, actress; Joe Dallesandro, actor; Andy Warhol, artist, New York City

Outtake from Andy Warhol and members of the Factory: Andy Warhol, artist; Paul Morrissey, director; Joe Dallesandro, actor, New York City

Andy Warhol and members of The Factory, New York City

The Mission Council, Saigon, South Vietnam

The Chicago Seven, Chicago

The Young Lords: Pablo “Yoruba” Guzmán, Minister of Information; Gloria González, Field Marshal; Juan González, Minister of Education; and Denise Oliver, Minister of Economic Development, New York City

Outtake From Andy Warhol and members of The Factory: Eric Emerson, actor; Jay Johnson, actor; Tom Hompertz, actor; and Gerard Malanga, poet, New York City

PHOTO SpEx 2023 Avedon

In 1969, Richard Avedon was at a crossroads. After a five-year hiatus, the photographer started making portraits again, this time with a new camera and a new sense of scale. Trading his handheld Rolleiflex for a larger, tripod-mounted device, he reinvented his studio dynamic. Instead of dancing around his subjects from behind a viewfinder, as he had in his lively fashion pictures, he could now stand beside a stationary camera and meet them head-on. Facing down groups of the era’s preeminent artists, activists, and politicians, he made huge photomural portraits, befitting their outsized cultural influence. On the centennial of the photographer’s birth, 

 will bring together three of these monumental works, some as wide as 35 feet. For Avedon, the murals expanded the artistic possibilities of photography, radically reorienting viewers and subjects in a subsuming, larger-than-life view.

The murals are society portraits. In them, Avedon assembles giants of the late twentieth century—members of Andy Warhol’s Factory, architects of the Vietnam war, and demonstrators against that war—who together shaped an extraordinarily turbulent era of American life. Presented in one gallery, their enormous portraits will stage an unlikely conversation among historically opposed camps, as well as contemporary viewers. The formal innovations of Avedon’s high style—of starkly lit bodies in an unsparing white surround—are best realized in these works, where subjects jostle and crowd the frame, and bright voids between them crackle with tension. Uniting the murals with session outtakes and contemporaneous projects, the exhibition will track Avedon’s evolving approach to group portraiture, through which he so transformed the conventions of the genre.

The exhibition is made possible by Joyce Frank Menschel.

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Richard Avedon: MURALS

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