Andywarholgets Tough

WINTER 2002 The Magazine of The Heinz Endowments Andy Warhol Gets Tough Pittsburgh’s pop culture museum uses a painful exhibit to promote a civic dialogue on racism. INSIDE: Why Design Matters BioBurgh Youth + Art = Work message inside Volume 2 Number 1 Winter 2002 To our readers Founded more than four decades Our fields of emphasis include n our cover story for this issue, Andy Warhol Museum In various ways, the museum has sought to rise to that apart, the Howard Heinz Endowment, philanthropy in general and the 1 director Tom Sokolowski recounts the question that challenge. Nothing the Warhol has done to date has been so established in 1941, and the disciplines represented by our grant- people often asked when informed that the museum bold—or so carefully considered—as its staging of Without Vira I. Heinz Endowment, established making programs: Arts & Culture; To Our Readers I would be hosting an exhibit on lynching and racial violence: Sanctuary. But it has presented forums for political candidates in 1986, are the products of a deep Children, Youth & Families; family commitment to community Economic Opportunity; Education; Why the Warhol? to discuss their support for the arts. It has staged discussions, and the common good that began and the Environment. These five 2 A little more than a decade ago, when Senator John Heinz, presentations and exhibits that raise tough questions about with H. J. Heinz and continues programs work together on behalf of who was then chairman of the Howard Heinz Endowment, racism and homophobia. And Sokolowski himself frequently to this day. three shared organizational goals: Without Sanctuary and his wife, Teresa, were working to bring the museum to wades into community debates about aesthetics, civic design, The Heinz Endowments is based enabling southwestern Pennsylvania At Pittsburgh’s Andy Warhol museum: brutal art leads to Pittsburgh, a similar but even more fundamental question was and the role and quality of public art. in Pittsburgh, where we use to embrace and realize a vision of heartfelt conversations on racism. asked: Why a Warhol? Why a museum dedicated to the glitzy All of this can be disconcerting. It can upset people who our region as a laboratory for the itself as a premier place both to development of solutions to chal- live and to work; making the region pop culture sensibilities of a single controversial artist? prefer their art tame and their cultural institutions austere and lenges that are national in scope. a center of quality learning and Teresa Heinz answered that question definitively at the quiet; just as it can trouble purists who fret about art being Although the majority of our giving educational opportunity; and making 18 museum’s opening in 1994. “To me,” she said, “all art poses dragged down by demands for educational value and commu- is concentrated within southwestern diversity and inclusion defining Designing the Future the same questions as Paul Gauguin’s masterpiece, which the nity engagement. But, in a very real sense, that discomfort Pennsylvania, we work wherever elements of the region’s character. artist titled, Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where is a measure of the Warhol’s faithfulness to its mission. necessary, including statewide and Space designs that please architects also need to please Are We Going? Andy’s work asked those questions of our entire By staging Without Sanctuary, the Warhol did not erase nationally, to fulfill our mission. That the people who use them. mission is to help our region thrive culture, on behalf of an entire generation.” the racial divide that exists in Pittsburgh as in so many other as a whole community — economically, Implicit in those words was a challenge to the Warhol for cities around America. That was never its expectation. But as ecologically, educationally and 20 the future. A museum celebrating the works of this probing our cover story shows, it did challenge people. It did open culturally — while advancing the artist could not become a mere repository for his art and more than a few minds. It did shine back a mirror not just on state of knowledge and practice in The Business of Bioscience remain true to his spirit. Like the artist himself, it would need the past, but also on the culture of the present. In the process, the fields in which we work. Economic Opportunity grantmaking is speeding the flow to be curious, provocative and willing to challenge us with it showed how valuable a cultural institution can be in helping of scientific advances from laboratory to marketplace. ideas about what our community and society stand for: who a community to grapple with an issue for which the only 26 we are, what we believe and what we think the future holds. solutions, in the end, are knowledge and understanding. Art Works Grant Oliphant At-risk youth embrace arts programs as paid apprentices Director of Planning and Communications and learn basic employment skills. 30 Here & There Comments: The staff of h magazine and The Heinz Endowments welcome your h magazine is a publication of The Heinz Endowments. At the Endowments, comments. All print and email letters must include an address with daytime and we are committed to promoting learning in philanthropy and in the specific fields evening phone numbers. We reserve the right to edit any submission for clarity represented by our grantmaking programs. As an expression of that commitment, and space. Published material also will be posted on The Heinz Endowments’ this publication is intended to share information about significant lessons web site, which offers current and back issues of the magazine. and insights we are deriving from our work. Editorial Team Linda Braund, Nancy Grejda, Maxwell King, Maureen Marinelli, Grant Oliphant, Douglas Root. Design: Landesberg Design Associates By Jim Davidson Photography by Lynn Johnson On the way to The Andy Warhol Museum to see the Without Sanctuary exhibit of lynching postcards and photographs, 15-year-old Matt Mayger was thinking about his family history in Georgia three generations ago. He knew his great-grandfather had been a Baptist minister and a pillar of the community in Athens, Savannah and Marietta. That much was apparent from the old photographs that had been passed down through the family.There was also talk that the Rev. Oscar Nash had been a grand wizard in the Ku Klux Klan in without sanctuary the 1910s—or so said Mayger’s grandmother, At Pittsburgh’s Andy Warhol Museum, a wrenching exhibit on lynching helps a the youngest of 14 children in the family. young man confront his family’s past— and a reluctant community examine Before her death a few years ago, she had its feelings about race. talked about witnessing a lynching as a little girl, and about her father’s role in the Klan. Jim Davidson is a Pittsburgh-based writer who teaches journalism at Carnegie Mellon University and edits FOCUS, the faculty newspaper. Two high school students are transfixed by a graphic picture of a lynching victim, one of 98 postcard photographs in Without Sanctuary, an exhibit at Pittsburgh's Andy Warhol Museum. A museum record 31,400 viewed the unflinching history of racial violence in America. n that morning in October, Mayger was just others vented shock and other feelings they couldn’t begin to one of the 60 students from Greater Latrobe name. Finally, Mayger spoke up and began peeling the family Senior High School visiting the Warhol onion, telling not only about his grandfather’s grand wizardry, because they had volunteered to work on a but also about his father who “woke up” to the reality of project to combat racism. With the faces of racism while serving in Vietnam and afterward, moving to Ohis grandmother and great-grandfather imprinted on his California where people mixed more freely with one another. mind, Mayger set about looking for evidence that the family His father had learned to respect all people, rejecting much stories were true. of his Southern upbringing, and he had taught his son to Mayger walked solemnly past 98 postcard images showing do the same, Mayger explained. the grisly spectacle of human beings who were whipped, And there it was. More than 86 years after the fact, a polite, beaten, stoned, stripped, gouged, burned, mutilated, shot cheerful teenager from Pennsylvania was implicating his and then hanged by their necks from trees, from lampposts, great-grandfather in the killing of Leo Frank, a Jewish factory from bridge railings. owner who had been railroaded and lynched following the The great majority of the victims in the postcards are black killing of a young woman worker. men, their faces and bodies contorted in death. All around Mayger’s discovery—and the ongoing discussion that them, in many cases, are the beaming faces of white men and followed—was likely the most dramatic episode during the the occasional child, grinning at the camera to proclaim baldly exhibit, yet it was not the only occasion for tears of anger and the carnival atmosphere that so often accompanies the mob regret as dozens of school groups and thousands of visitors murders. Mayger examined one photograph after another filed past the photographs. Without Sanctuary sparked a lot of until finally coming to the last postcard, where a familiar face candid discussion on the taboo subject of racial violence, and stared back. played a significant role in keeping the history alive. There, just above white block letters proclaiming “The End For four months—September 22 through Martin Luther of Leo Frank, Hung by a Mob at Marietta, Ga., Aug 17, 1915,” King Day, including a three-week extension—Without was a square-jawed man with a brush mustache and fedora, Sanctuary haunted the sixth-floor gallery of the North Side standing nearly a head taller than the four other men gathered museum, breaking attendance records and broadening public around Frank’s manacled and lifeless body.

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