Andy Warhol was an American visual artist, film director, producer, and leading figure in the pop art movement. His works explore the relationship between artistic expression, advertising, and celebrity culture that flourished by the 1960s, and span a variety of media, including painting, silkscreening, photography, film, and sculpture. Some of his best-known works include the silkscreen paintings Campbell's Soup Cans (1962) and Marilyn Diptych (1962), the experimental films Empire (1964) and Chelsea Girls (1966), and the multimedia events known as the Exploding Plastic Inevitable (1966–67).
HarperCollins Publishers LLC is an Anglo-American publishing company that is considered to be one of the "Big Five" English-language publishers, along with Penguin Random House, Hachette, Macmillan, and Simon & Schuster. HarperCollins is headquartered in New York City and is a subsidiary of News Corp.
Tama Janowitz is an American novelist and a short story writer. She is often referenced as one of the main "brat pack" authors, along with Bret Easton Ellis and Jay McInerney.
James Warhola is an American artist who has illustrated more than two dozen children's picture books since 1987.
Ecco is a New York–based publishing imprint of HarperCollins. It was founded in 1971 by Daniel Halpern as an independent publishing company; Publishers Weekly described it as "one of America's best-known literary houses." In 1999 Ecco was acquired by HarperCollins, with Halpern remaining at the head. Since 2000, Ecco has published the yearly anthology The Best American Science Writing, edited by Jesse Cohen. In 2011, Ecco created two separate publishing lines, one "curated" by chef-author Anthony Bourdain and the other by novelist Dennis Lehane.
Viva is an American actress, writer and former Warhol superstar.
Blue Movie is a 1969 American erotic film written, produced and directed by Andy Warhol. It is the first adult erotic film depicting explicit sex to receive wide theatrical release in the United States, and is regarded as a seminal film in the Golden Age of Porn (1969–1984), which, before the legalization of pornography in Denmark on July 1, 1969, started on June 12, 1969 with the release of Blue Movie at the Elgin Theater, and later, the New Andy Warhol Garrick Theatre, in New York City. Blue Movie helped inaugurate the "porno chic" phenomenon, in which porn was publicly discussed by celebrities and taken seriously by film critics, in modern American culture, and shortly thereafter, in many other countries throughout the world. According to Warhol, Blue Movie was a major influence in the making of Last Tango in Paris, an internationally controversial erotic drama film starring Marlon Brando and released a few years after Blue Movie was made. Viva and Louis Waldon, playing themselves, starred in Blue Movie.
Waldemar Januszczak is an English art critic and television documentary producer and presenter. Formerly the art critic of The Guardian, he took the same role at The Sunday Times in 1992, and has twice won the Critic of the Year award.
Campbell's Soup Cans is a work of art produced between November 1961 and June 1962 by American artist Andy Warhol. It consists of thirty-two canvases, each measuring 20 inches (51 cm) in height × 16 inches (41 cm) in width and each consisting of a painting of a Campbell's Soup can—one of each of the canned soup varieties the company offered at the time. The works were Warhol's hand-painted depictions of printed imagery deriving from commercial products and popular culture and belong to the pop art movement.
Matt Wrbican (1959–2019) was an American archivist and authority on the life of the artist Andy Warhol. He earned his BFA in Painting and MFA in Intermedia/Electronic Art from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), where he studied with Bruce Breland. He began working with the Warhol Archive in 1991 in New York City and became Chief Archivist of The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. He managed the Archive and Warhol's Time Capsules for more than two decades at the Warhol Museum, where he unpacked, processed, preserved, and documented an estimated 500,000 objects. His last book is A is for Archive: Warhol's World from A to Z. He also exhibited his artwork at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts and Galleries. He died on Saturday, June 1, 2019, after a four-year battle with brain cancer.
John P. "Johnny" Dodd was a lighting designer for theater, dance and music active in the downtown art scene in Manhattan during the latter half of the 20th century.
Kiss is a 1963 silent American experimental film directed by Andy Warhol, which runs 50 minutes and features various couples – man and woman, woman and woman, man and man – kissing for 3½ minutes each. The film features Naomi Levine, Barbara Rubin, Gerard Malanga, Rufus Collins, Johnny Dodd, Ed Sanders, Mark Lancaster, Fred Herko, Baby Jane Holzer, Robert Indiana, Andrew Meyer, John Palmer, Pierre Restany, Harold Stevenson, Philip van Rensselaer, Charlotte Gilbertson, Marisol, Steven Holden, Bela Lugosi and unidentified others.
Claire Harman is a British literary critic and book reviewer who has written for the Times Literary Supplement, Literary Review, Evening Standard, the Sunday Telegraph and other publications. Harman is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and has taught English at the Universities of Oxford and Manchester. She has taught creative writing at Columbia University, and been Professor of Creative Writing at Durham University since 2016.
The Druds was a short-lived 1963 avant-garde noise music band founded by Andy Warhol, that featured prominent members of the New York proto-conceptual art and minimal art community. The band's noise rock sound has been compared to that of Henry Flynt and/or The Primitives, the band that featured the first collaboration of Lou Reed and John Cale, who would soon form The Velvet Underground.
Blake Gopnik is an American art critic who has lived in New York City since 2011. He previously spent a decade as chief art critic of The Washington Post, prior to which he was an arts editor and critic in Canada. He has a doctorate in art history from Oxford University. He is the author of Warhol, a biography of the American artist Andy Warhol.
Helen "Nell" Louise Zink is an American writer living in Germany. After being a long term penpal of Avner Shats, she came to prominence in her fifties with the help of Jonathan Franzen and her novel, Mislaid, was longlisted for the National Book Award. Her debut The Wallcreeper was released in the United States by the independent press Dorothy and named one of 100 notable books of 2014 by The New York Times, as was Mislaid. Zink then released Nicotine, Private Novelist and Doxology through Ecco Press. In 2022 she published Avalon, again a New York Times notable book, with Alfred A. Knopf.
Catherine Simon is an American portrait photographer and writer. She is known for her photographs of influential musicians, artists, and writers, including The Clash, Patti Smith, Madonna, Andy Warhol, and William S. Burroughs. One of her photographs of Bob Marley was used on the front cover of his 1978 album, Kaya.
Sontag: Her Life and Work is a 2019 biography of American writer Susan Sontag written by Benjamin Moser.
Andy Warhol (1928–1987) was an American artist, film director, and producer.
The Andy Warhol Robot is an animatronic robot created by Andy Warhol in 1981, as a self-portrait.
