PHOTOGRAPHY RESOURCES THAT WORK FOR ME

PHOTOGRAPHY RESOURCES THAT WORK FOR ME 

 I am going to list out my journey and what works for me. I have made a living from photography since 1978. Below are all listings that I have worked with. I am sure there are millions more but these are what I found to be the best for my adventures in making and selling fine art photography.

THINK REVERSE IS MY MOTO.. GO THE OTHER DIRECTION WHEN EVERYONE IS GOING FORWARD.  FOR ME .... TOY CAMERAS, PINHOLE,  RUTH THORNE THOMPSON..  WETPLATE. XEROX.. NOW, 8X10.

Millions of resources are out there. below is what works for me. If you have something that worked for you let me know. 

KEYWORDS … Clarity of Goals and Continuity in your work.

Style/brand/vision.. a thread that runs through everything... A voice.

A favorite quote that i love and adopt .. Don't look for Work but Make Work… don't look for the job.. create the job.

My lifes top success are all from long habit of gathering the community. And then riding that wave. 

My list .. in college was The Codex - a correspondence art publication. gathering artists to submit an edition of 150 works to make one large bound portfolio of dozens of artists x150.   Museums around the country snapped them up and archived them. And great book stores like Printed Matter in NYC. The porfolio/ book traveled. The pages could be turned into a exhibition.

Next the MudPeople art performances made front page news in NYC , Denver ,  Taos.  

 Next a natural was gathering a early online salon  early internet surfing .. we call it FAB fine art board...this was 1992 early. We gathered and had a show Off The Highway at RULE gallery in Denver and dozens after. The Wall Street Journal wrote a review as The Internet's First Art Show". 

 Then The Denver Salon ..gathering curating photographers I admired. We got museum shows, exhibitions in NYC, Aspen and Japan.   

Next I should mention starting a Community Garden..Denver Urban Garden's first garden. Community gardens are great at many levels..for one its where I witnessed the start of The Museum of Contemporary Art Denver when Marina Grave said don't you think we need a contemporary art museum ? ... I rose to the director in 1999. .. https://www.instagram.com/mca_denver/    or founding board of RedLine the mission that fosters education and engagement between artists and communities.  

Next is festivals .. Inspired by the Houston Fotofest I started one in Denver in 2004. It grew into a monster of fun with photography. The community celebrating photography.  Next is realizing there is a community of Photography Festivals around the world. So we founded the Festival of Light to share resources and talent and photography discoveries. https://festivaloflight.net/   Next is my ol trick power in numbers formed 

The Denver Collage Club https://www.instagram.com/denvercollage/ 

Currently my passion is a new community garden in a new rough side of town and street art project the Big Picture Colorado. whom like the garden the community of all walks of life participates. https://www.instagram.com/the_big_picture_colo/

Linktree

Mark Sink Linktree https://linktr.ee/marksink  is a one stop shop. And its free.

FESTIVAL OF LIGHT  Many great photo festivals

http://festivaloflight.net/

Lenscratch !   Call for Entry :

http://lenscratch.com/resources/callsforentry/

Quantum - I am recently interested in NFT's  Quantum is the first platform focused on curating and dropping NFT collections and making NFTs easily accessible for both artists and collectors.   https://quantum.art

HITTING A THOUSAND BIRDS WITH ONE STONE

CRITICAL MASS !!!  http://www.photolucida.org/

FotoFest  Meeting Place

http://www.fotofest.org

PHOTO LUCIDA 

http://www.photolucida.org/

SANTA FE

http://www.visitcenter.org/

Finding your communities.

PHOTOSHOWCASE

http://www.photoeye.com/gallery/photoshowcase/

WESTAF

http://www.westaf.org   CAFE  https://www.callforentry.org

CAFE IS AARON SISKIN AND POLLACK KRASNER 

http://www.aaronsiskind.org

LENS SCRATCH

http://lenscratch.com/resources/callsforentry/

http://lenscratch.com/

FLAK PHOTO GROUP

https://www.facebook.com/groups/flakphoto

https://www.facebook.com/groups/flakphotobooks

COLORADO PHOTOGRAPHIC ART CENTER

http://www.cpacphoto.org

www.CBCA.org   Debra Jordy  WATCH WHERE MONEY IN ARTS IS FLOWING.

DADA

http://www.denverart.org  ( DENVER’S BEST ART DEALERS)

NINE DOT ARTS

http://ninedotarts.com/

INTERESTING NATIONAL RESOURCES

NY FOUNDATION FOR THE ARTS

http://www.nyfa.org 

GUGGENHEIM

http://www.gf.org/about-the-foundation/the-fellowship/   (Guggenheim fellowships)

http://www.pkf.org ( Pollock-Krasner Foundation )

https://annenberg.usc.edu  (Getty Fellowships)

SAATCHI

http://www.saatchionline.com

SELLING

20X200   

http://www.20x200.com

PINTEREST

http://pinterest.com

ETSY

http://www.etsy.com/category/art

PAYPAL BUTTONS !!   SUPER EASY

BOOKS   

On Photography Susan Sontag

Why People Photograph Robert Adams

HELP - CONSULTATION

Mary Virginia Swanson 

http://mvswanson.com

How to Succeed in Commercial Photography:  Insights from a Leading Consultant Selina Maitreya 

ZONE ZERO

http://zonezero.com ( GREAT, MIND, PUBLISHER AND ARTIST RESOURCE BY Pedro Meyer

MAKE A BOOK

LULU AND BLURB

Practice putting a book together. The software is really easy. Just the process of editing and placing images is a good workout to focus your concept and narrative.   

WHAT'S GOING ON IN THE DENVER LOCAL COMMUNITY

Dikeou Collection and their art mailer.

ZING MAGAZINE .. a curatorial crossing.

http://www.dikeoucollection.org

Denver Arts and Venues 

https://www.artsandvenuesdenver.com/about

Projections and Jumbo Trons to show your projects 

https://nightlightsdenver.com/

Art Donations .. how many have you done this year. ,,I do up to 15-20 a year.

In-Kind for Non-profits... They have opened doors to many jobs for me.

START A SALON

SALONS

Starting salons… picking people .. The Denver Salon  The Denver Collage Club 

Getting together to inspire and show and tell. Talk about the arts.

This power in numbers which makes visibility of your work much higher and easier to obtain venues to show.

I have recently started a Collage Salon.   The Denver Collage Club

Community

Currently The Big Picture.. trading files with people from around the world.

Wheat Pasting them around town and around the world.  The Big Picture Colorado 

Internet Salons … First was AOL Photography Forum  .. the Fine Art Photography board FAB.

was did the first internet art show .. BOB .. then Off The Highway at Rule Gallery.

Wall St Journal at the first internet art show .. Denver Post .. Rocky Mt News.

DO YOU KNOW HOW MUCH A FULL PAGE AD COSTS IN A NATIONAL NEWS PAPER LET A LONE A LOCAL?

Ok started friendster to myspace to Facebook..flicker tumblr  blog.spot … what works?   Blog spot .. and learn sharing cloud docs.

A large amount of traffic and thus inquiries and work have come from keeping up with these free agents. There is software that will post your ideas and work on all your boards at once so time is not an issue.

Some internet tales …Ever heard of the The Long tale ? ..its the power of notch and special interest.

Stepping up to  The Rise of the Creative Class  ( see the book .. Hickenloopers platform to becoming mayor. Of where art is in our society to day.

Target marketing efforts…   Find the community the Long Tail of your type of work and direction. Great information you can apply to yourself is out in the open. Research others work that is like yours and check their CVs to find where they are showing and selling

Galleries …never walk cold into a gallery. 

Visibility

New ideas in self-promotion pieces.

Events that art writers pick up.

Curating 

Using alternative spaces for an event.

Wheatpaste  Xerox print outs.. xerox quality is astonishingly high

Of Zines  .. do you know what is Zine is?

Large printouts newspaper size ..

 

If your making a self-promotion piece WHY NOT make it art.

Less is more.

SIMPLE XEROX  handout

Other resources i have used

http://www.alternativephotography.com

http://www.lomography.com

http://www.czechslovakphotos.com

http://www.icp.org

http://photographmag.com  (BEST NYC PHOTO GUIDE PUBLISHED)

The tips and tricks of making a living as a fine art photographer.

Fine Art Photography in the commercial marketplace.

Using art as an opportunity to open doors in today's photography marketplace.

Understanding the business of art photography.

The many free resources available to artistic photographers and the many avenues to create visibility and cash flow.

Separating the work you love from the work that pays the bills

Visibility as a fine art photographer

Identifying appropriate exhibition venues for showing completed bodies of work.

Co-Op .. or APAD

How to balance fine art photography with commercial photography.

How to stay creative, recognize the strengths in your work, and build upon those strengths

Using art as an opportunity to open doors in today's photography marketplace.

__________________________

Business Marketing Model

I am very interested in the rediscovery and emergence of the career of Laura Webb Nichols  -  The path of a curator that brought a lost photographer back into the light, primarily the business marketing model, the publications, the exhibitions and placed into historic collections.   -  https://www.lorawebbnichols.org  https://www.instagram.com/lorawebbnichols  

___________________________

Shots Magazine

Blue Eyes Magazine

Zing Magazine  

Photolucida

FotoFest

Festival of Light

Cool Hunting

Media Bistro

Solargraphy

PhotoPol

Pop-ology

PH Magazine

World Wide Pinhole Day

FB Groups

Flak Photo Network

VERNACULAR PHOTOGRAPHY MAFIA

DEVELOP Photo

Art10

E-ART by Bruno Rossi

The Salon Romantique

Kopeikin Gallery12

Street shots Photography / Photographie de rue

A BOOK ABOUT DEATH20+

A New History of Photography

Women and their Big Cameras

Wet Plate Collodion Photographer

Alternative photographic processes

the blackbird art circle2

LAP - Lovers of Analog Photography

KLASSIK MAGAZINE20+

Appropriate Punk Artist Group

Urbanism

The Disfarmer Project

PLOVDIV photographic community-Bulgaria

Bruce Conner

Antiquarian Avant-Garde Art & Processes

Art-Republic / Studio & Gallery20+

Carte de Visite and Cabinet Card Photography

Film Shooters+

Indie Film Community

Joseph Petzval

The Dallas Cultural Landscape

ThirdEye Photography Society

Vintage Photo Postcards

Aspen Art Museum Andy Warhol: Lifetimes - COLORADO CONNECTION - Mark Sink

 Aspen Art Museum 

Andy Warhol: Lifetimes

Dec 3, 2021-Mar 27, 2022

ANDY IN ASPEN

COLORADO CONNECTION

Mark Sink's memories -

 

Video -  https://youtu.be/QkukCqYCsZg 

Days before Andy Warhol’s death in February 1987, his friend John Powers sent him a certificate from the Colorado Board of Stock Inspection certifying its approval of Warhol’s personally designed livestock brand: ‘A/W’, with a sideways ‘W’. It was a bittersweet final link in the chain connecting Warhol to Colorado, and specifically to Aspen: one that spanned 30 years, from his earliest days as an exhibiting artist through the height of his fame.

The first record of Warhol in Aspen is in December 1956. Still working in advertising, and just beginning to land gallery shows in Manhattan, he was enjoying early national exposure and would soon have a two-page spread in Life magazine. An exhibition of early blotted line drawings by his friend Patricia Moore was held at Aspen’s Four Seasons Club that winter before touring across the west. Exhibition notes uncovered by Warhol biographer Blake Gopnik — whose voluminous archival research also unearthed the artist’s cattle brand — indicate that the show, which was almost certainly Warhol’s first outside New York, did very badly indeed and that the tour sold almost nothing. One of the few works that did sell, however, went to Elizabeth Paepcke, wife of Aspen city father Walter Paepcke, founder of the Aspen Skiing Company and the Aspen Institute, and originator of the utopian ‘Aspen Idea.’

In 1964, Phyllis Johnson, then resident in Aspen, used the city’s name — ‘a symbol of the freewheeling life’, she believed—for the title of a new publication: Aspen, a pioneering magazine in-a-box. In 1966, it was none other than Warhol who designed Aspen’s third issue. Dubbed ‘the Fab issue’, the contents included a flip book of Warhol’s film Kiss (1963); coverage of an LSD conference in Berkeley, California; a report on local off-grid living; and a 12-card selection of pop and op art paintings from the collection of Carbondale-based collectors John and Kimiko Powers. Among these were works by Willem de Kooning, Jasper Johns, Claes Oldenberg and Warhol’s 200 Campbell Soup Cans (1962), alongside artist interviews and commentary by Powers himself.

Powers remained a champion of Warhol’s work in the decades that followed. His partner, Kimiko, was the subject of one of Warhol’s earliest and best-known society portraits, photo- graphed and first printed in June 1972. Works from their collection will be exhibited at the Powers Art Center in Carbondale this winter, concurrent with ‘Andy Warhol: Lifetimes’ at the Aspen Art Museum. Along with supporting his work, Powers also helped Warhol put together a local land purchase — 40 acres in Missouri Heights—acquired in 1972. (Jasper Johns owned plots adjoining Warhol’s, and Robert Rauschenberg had one too). Warhol told The Aspen Times, in September 1981, that he had come to Aspen ‘many times’ to see his land, but that he had no intention of building on it, as it was ‘too pretty.’

Warhol visited Aspen regularly in the first half of the 1980s, often to celebrate New Year’s Eve, each time diligently logging the names and his impressions of people he met in his diaries. The first trip of this period was in August 1981, when he visited the Powerses in Carbondale and went to Colorado State University in Fort Collins, which was hosting a solo exhibition of his work. Warhol’s retinue included his boyfriend Jon Gould, artist Christopher Makos, Bob Colacello, editor of Warhol’s publication Interview — who found time to personally lobby Carl Bergman, of Carl’s Pharmacy in Aspen, to start carrying the magazine — and the group also called in on two of Aspen’s boldest-faced names of the moment: Jack Nicholson and John Denver. That winter, Warhol returned with Gould, Makos and Denver- based photographer Mark Sink to celebrate New Year’s Eve, staying in Castle Creek Valley at the home of ‘Baby’ Jane Holzer, a former Warhol superstar. During the trip, Warhol made his first attempt to ski. ‘It was easy,’ he wrote in his diary of the Powder Pandas lesson with instructor Gary Bonn, ‘all the two-year-olds skiing with me, and if you start when you’re two you can really go with the waves and relax and become a good skier, but I was so tense. I fell three times.’ Warhol’s Aspen visits became increasingly celebrity-heavy: even in 1981, he noted that visiting the era-defining disco, Andre’s, ‘was like trying to get into Studio 54.’ Indeed, Dean Sobel, professor of art history and museum studies at Denver University, observes in One Hour Ahead: The Avant-Garde in Aspen 1945– 2004 (2004) that Warhol’s visits were ‘strangely symbolic’ of how the town had changed since the mid-1960s, when earnest young pop artists like Roy Lichtenstein and Claes Oldenburg came to Aspen for Powers-sponsored artist residencies. In a recent interview, Sobel added that, by the 1980s, Warhol ‘was still the grandfather of pop art and a really famous person, but he was really more of a People magazine celebrity’.

Though this performative aspect to Warhol’s time in Aspen can’t be denied, Gopnik argues that the artist’s Colorado trips can’t be simply reduced to this. Art, he notes, was always at the core of these visits — whether it was time spent with collectors like the Powerses, or the numerous photographs and Polaroids Warhol took of the local landscape and architecture, skiers and après-ski. In Aspen, as ever with Warhol, art, celebrity, life and performance are inseparable. ‘There’s the cliché that Warhol was his own greatest work of art,’ Gopnik said when I interviewed him recently. ‘And that cliché dates back to almost the day he began making Pop art. But it’s more than just a cliché, it’s also a central element in the most important conceptual art of the 1960s on, that you can eliminate the barriers between art and life’.

Andrew Travers is Arts and Culture editor at The Aspen Times.

Photos Mark Sink, use with permission by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Inc.

Aspen Art Museum  637 East Hyman Avenue  Aspen, Colorado 81611

https://www.aspenartmuseum.org/warhol/warholinaspen

The Andy Warhol Diaries - Netflix - Ryan Murphy

Almost exactly 35 years since the famed pop artist died, Netflix has released The Andy Warhol Diaries, a new documentary that scratches beneath the surface of the artist’s enigmatic life and work. Ryan Murphy’s six-part series is steered by the best-selling book of the same name, compiled by editor Pat Hackett via a series of transcribed calls with the artist over more than a decade. 

https://youtu.be/aeC76ncf66w

The New York Post - March 9, 2022

When Harriet Woodsom Gould died in 2016 in her nineties, she left behind a trove of family heirlooms dating back to the 1700s in her Amesbury, Mass., home. Yet in her attic, she had a secret veritable shrine to pop art.

There, she had stashed her late son Jon Gould’s belongings for decades since his death in 1986 from AIDS. He had vases painted by Jean-Michel Basquiat, works by Keith Haring and dozens and dozens of gifts — photos, valentines, sketches, letters and more — from pop god Andy Warhol.

“My mother kept everything,” Jon’s twin brother, Jay Gould, told The Post. Jay knew his brother “had some type of relationship” with Warhol in the 1980s, though Jon always remained discreet about it. “We were very close, identical twins, but we never talked a lot about his sexuality,” Jay, now 68, explained. “It was a different time.”

Yet, he was still stunned to read the poetry and love notes Jon wrote to the older artist. “I didn’t realize the relationship was as deep as it was.”

Andy Warhol Snowmobiling with Jon Gould on new year’s day, January 1, 1983 in Aspen, Colorado.  

Gould and Warhol on New Year’s Day in Aspen, Colorado, in 1983. Photo Mark Sink

Actually, no one really knew. Gould was Warhol’s last romance, a young Paramount executive with floppy hair and preppy good looks who died tragically at 33. And though Warhol frequently mentioned him in his famed diaries, published posthumously in 1989, the artist’s dashed-off musings gave the impression that Jon was more of a crush than a genuine partner. (Plus, few could get past the diaries’ droll, often mean, takes on the rich and famous. Poor Liz Taylor was described as looking “like a — belly button”!)

The new six-part Netflix series, “The Andy Warhol Diaries,” however, aims to change that. Premiering Wednesday, it digs beneath the diaries’ surface and into Warhol’s later romantic relationships and their impact on Warhol’s life and work. In doing so, it paints a more vulnerable portrait of the artist, who often presented himself as a cold, asexual weirdo.

“He was a man full of desire, full of humanity, and that comes through in his queer longing and in his search for spiritual meaning,” the series director Andrew Rossi told The Post. 

‘They were really in love’

The New York Post 

By Raquel Laneri and Nicki Gostin

March 9, 2022

https://nypost.com/2022/03/09/the-andy-warhol-diaries-reveals-artists-secret-love-life/

‘WHAT REALLY KILLED BASQUIAT?

 

‘WHAT REALLY KILLED BASQUIAT?

Annina Nosei is upset. A new play by Ishmael Reed, a leading Black literary figure in America, makes out the dealer who gave Jean-Michel Basquiat his first show in New York as a rapacious profiteer. It also has a lot of dark things to say about Basquiat’s relationship with his sometime collaborator, Andy Warhol.
The Slave Who Loved Caviar—structured as a CSI episode and promoted as satire—investigates wonders if what "really" killed Basquiat wasn't just a drug overdose but “foul play” at the hands of the corrupting New York art world.
Nosei, ever alert to depictions of the role she played in Basquiat’s life, attended a performance last December during the play’s three-week run at Theater for the New City, an East Village Institution. She walked out at intermission.
“I don’t hear very well,” the octogenarian dealer told me. “And I couldn’t understand what the actors were saying, so I left.” Crystal Field, who founded the Off-off Broadway theater in 1970, happens to be Nosei’s neighbor and sent her the script. Conceding that she read only “the parts that mentioned my name,” Nosei refuted them, point by point.

However, I discovered while watching a live-streamed performance—not the best way to experience a stage play, but Covid paranoia kept me home—Reed’s drubbing doesn’t come up till Act Two. Characters describe Nosei as a “slavedriver” who in 1981 locked the young Basquiat in her SoHo gallery’s basement (a “dungeon” in the play), and either paid for drugs to make him work harder or turned a blind eye to his use of them, while forcing sales of purportedly unfinished paintings to invasive collectors whom she brought downstairs.
All of this has been said so many times before that it’s practically folklore. Such is the power of myth, particularly in the age of social media, but Nosei would like the record corrected once and for all.
First, that “basement.” Though located below the gallery, it was a 2000 sq.ft-studio that had a skylight at the back and windows on the sidewalk that allowed passersby to see in. In other words, no dungeon. “I was never locked anywhere,” Basquiat told Marc Miller in a videotaped 1982 interview. “Christ! If I had been white, they would just say artist-in-residence.”
According to Nosei, the only collectors who went down there were Lenore and Herbert Schorr, early champions and friends of the artist who came at his invitation.
It was disappointing to hear Warhol demonised in the play as a vampiric artist who exploited other talents, and conceptual art as “the longest running con game in art history”—coals that burned out long ago. Reed, the author of nine other plays, as well as 30 books of fiction, nonfiction and poetry, consulted a number of published sources about both Warhol and Basquiat (he sent a bibliography). Perhaps owing to his characteristic, sometimes dazzling, mashup of historical and current newsmakers, including Richard Pryor, Jeffrey Epstein and Maurizio Cattelan, some of it came out equal parts fiction and fact.

For example, one character quotes Basquiat’s reference to his experience in Nosei’s basement as a “sick factory” that he hated. Only that’s what he said about a warehouse in Modena that the Italian dealer Emilio Mazzoli rented for his use. Also, it was Mazzoli, not Nosei, who paid him thousands of dollars in cash that he subsequently spent partly on drugs, limos, and caviar. “I am against drugs,” Nosei said. “I don’t even like medicine.”

If so, Reed asks, why didn’t she intervene? (As if anyone could.) Nosei says Basquiat’s drug use was the reason that she kicked him out of the basement and rented him a nearby loft where he could do as he pleased without interference from her. “After that,” she insisted, “I didn’t have anything to do with him.” In the published version of the play, and subsequent productions, Reed promises to add lines indicating that, “Ms. Nosei disputes claims made by others.”
Reed says that he wrote the play to counter a “false narrative” about Basquiat foisted on Black people by the white art establishment, and by the artistic licence that Julian Schnabel took in his 1996 biographical film, Basquiat. He threads the plot with quotes from such archly conservative critics as Robert Hughes, who famously hated Basquiat’s work and was among the several white critics to disparage the artist as a wild savage, an uneducated street urchin, a monkey, and a primitive who merely “scribbled.”
To give such bigoted takedowns a different perspective is a legitimate and welcome pursuit. As one character in the play puts it, “Until the lion tells the story, the hunter will always be the hero.” All the same, to bring additional falsehoods to bear on the story doesn’t clarify anything, especially when it involves two of the most highly valued contemporary artists in the world.
Like Basquiat, fame found Reed early, with the publication of his first novel, Mumbo Jumbo. “I’d come to New York in 1962 with all of my belongings in a laundry bag,” he told me. “By 1967 I was a star. I left New York [for Berkeley, CA]. If I had remained, I would have perished from an overdose of affection. Maybe,” he added, “an older Black man could have given [Basquiat] direction. Instead, he admired degenerates like William Burroughs and anti-Semites like Kerouac. My play succeeded in challenging the nasty, anti-Basquiat attitude promoted by whites, a lot of it racist, and points to influences on Basquiat that [white critics] could not identify.
For my money, Reed’s play succeeds best at dramatising the construction of truth as dependent on whoever controls the narrative, which is always up for grabs. _Linda Yablonsky_ArtNewspaper   3.22.22

Andy Warhol Lifetimes show - Aspen Public Radio

Who was the real Andy Warhol? Aspen Art Museum explores the many answers Aspen Public Radio By Dominic Anthony Walsh

Published February 22, 2022

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Andy Warhol

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Courtesy Of Aspen Art Museum

Andy Warhol created many self-portraits throughout his career. This one is from 1986, the year before he died.

Andy Warhol — one of the most significant figures in modern art — had deep ties to Aspen. Before his death in 1987, he spent years cultivating a public persona as an idiosyncratic, superficial and unemotional person. An ongoing exhibition at the Aspen Art Museum casts light on a more private side of Warhol.

“Andy Warhol: Lifetimes”, an exhibit at Aspen Art Museum running through March 27, is similar to recent Warhol shows in Toronto and London — but this one was curated by Monica Majoli.

“The whole concept of the exhibition that the Tate (in London) was putting together was to try to create some clarity about how Warhol’s biography influenced his work,” Majoli said. “That, of course, dealt with elements of his identity as the son of an immigrant, working class — poor, actually — and as a gay man, as a Catholic.”

An accomplished artist herself, often working on themes related to sexuality and intimacy, Majoli brings a refined touch to the project — and ensures that Warhol’s biography doesn’t completely subsume his work.

Courtesy Of Aspen Art Museum

Warhol poses in drag.

The main exhibit at Aspen Art Museum starts with unsuccessful erotic works from the 1950s that bombed in New York City, before quickly pivoting to multimedia work from later in his career — including a colorful camouflage acrylic painting from late in his life.

The camo painting captures one of the main themes of the exhibition: Warhol’s intentional masking of his true personality behind a series of flashy personas.

“I was thinking of it within this context as relating both to the idea of being closeted and … Warhol sort of creating this persona, but sort of hiding behind this kind of cloaking that he was doing,” Majoli said.

In that exhibit space, we ran into Mark Sink, who had a handful of photographs. The Denver-based photographer knew Warhol and even photographed him in Aspen in the ’80s.

“I pride myself with Andy smiling,” he said, holding up a photo of Warhol in winter gear, partially covered in snow. “He was so happy here.”

As documented by The Aspen Times, Warhol had a 30-year connection to Aspen, with his first recorded visit in December 1956.

Mark Sink

Andy Warhol visited Aspen for the 1983 New Year.

Sink’s photos capture a New Year’s visit in the early ‘80s.

“He was very happy here. Look, smiling, smiling, smiling,” he said, thumbing through photographs before arriving at a somber-looking Warhol next to a flipped over snowmobile. “Not smiling — after the snowmobile crash. I dragged my hand in the snow, and it went up in the goggles of his boyfriend John, and off (the snowmobile) went. … I'm the guy that almost killed Andy Warhol.”

The photos — which aren’t part of the main exhibit — capture that emotional side of Warhol that he often kept hidden.

Mark Sink

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Andy Warhol sits behind Jon Gould, his boyfriend at the time in 1983.

Blake Gopnik is an art critic and author of the 2020 biography “Warhol.”

“He's obviously one of the great figures of the late 20th century — of all time, in fact — in art, and he's unusual, I think, because you have to know about the man to really understand the art, and you have to know about the art to understand the man,” Gopnik said. “And that's not always the case. But with Andy Warhol, I really think that the biography and the art are really closely connected.”

With Warhol, it’s hard to truly know “the man.”

“From a very young age, … he adopted a persona that you could say wasn't really him. It was a persona for the outside world,” Gopnik said. “The thing about Andy Warhol is: He didn't do it once. He didn't establish a persona and stick with it. Every five years, you could say there was a new Andy Warhol. And we've kind of got fixated on the Andy Warhol of the middle of the ’60s – where he's got the dark glasses and he's goofy, and he puts his fingers through his lips and says, ‘Gee, I don't know!’ But that's just one of the personas. And it certainly isn't the real Warhol, who was a super well-educated, incredibly intelligent man.”

Andy Warhol

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Courtesy Of Aspen Art Museum

Warhol's "Marilyn Diptych" is one of his best known works.

On Saturday, Gopnik and Majoli presented “Warhol: Real Love,” a conversation and Q&A at the museum’s rooftop cafe.

It was, as one audience member put it, “Riveting.”

Gopnik is like a guest made for the WHYY program “Fresh Air,” gracefully and succinctly drawing out nuances and contractions in Warhol’s biography. And Majoli — with her sharp, conversational questions — could easily fill in for Terry Gross or Dave Davies.

One throughline of the talk: Warhol’s mother, Julia Warhola.

“She really inspired him when he was a boy, in terms of his artistic proclivities,” Majoli said.

“Yeah, how many immigrant mothers say, ‘Now, son, you must be an artist when you grow up!’ Right? And that's more or less what she did,” Gopnik said.

Warhola, like her son, was an outsider — and marginalization would play a major role in their lives.

“He's not just an immigrant, but he's kind of the wrong kind of immigrant,” Gopkin said. “Everyone knows what an Italian is, what a Jew is, what an Irish person is. How many of you know what a Carpatho-Russian is? He did everything wrong his whole life, he wasn't even the right kind of immigrant. … And I think that touched him his whole life.”

“And his mother, she wasn't even the right kind of Carpatho-Russian. She pretended to be an old country babushka, but she was actually an incredibly complex, sophisticated cultural woman. … She was brilliant and eccentric, and she gave birth to a brilliant, eccentric son.”  And, he was gay.

In Warhol’s public life, his sexuality was something like an open secret — the artist only occasionally nodding at or playfully acknowledging in a roundabout way that he was gay.

But in his work — both public and private — his sexuality plays a more prominent role.

In the first room of the exhibition, opposite from the camouflage paintings, Warhol’s 1964 film, “Sleep,” continuously plays. It shows his lover, poet John Giorno, sleeping.

The movie comes from short reels of film, meticulously compiled and looped to create a truly tender 5½-hour view of Giorno.

Behind it, Majoli placed a room — curtained off — containing nude photos and sketches of men — some in sexual situations — that Warhol would use as references for other work. Most of the material in the room was private throughout his life.

“I thought this room was actually quite important in terms of understanding Warhol as a gay man and his own relationship to his sexuality, and the work that he made in relationship to sexuality and desire, I guess you might say,” Majoli said.

Sink said he thinks Warhol would have been happy to see the private photos made public.

“I think Andy would be very excited, you know, in raising the flag,” he said. “He always asked questions about sex. He was very interested in sex, and he loved the eroticism. And that just wasn't accepted in — especially queer — you know, to be gay. So, as that has come into a more acceptable genre now, I would like to think he would be excited.”

“Andy Warhol: Lifetimes” runs at Aspen Art Museum through March 27.