The works of Andy Warhol and Gus Van Sant will be on display starting Saturday at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art for a new exhibit showcasing the art of portraiture and the meaning of identity.
In celebration of the “One Step Big Shot” exhibit, the museum will host a free opening reception featuring food, entertainment from one of Van Sant’s favorite bands called The Hugs, and a photo booth. The reception begins at 6 p.m. Saturday, and the other exhibits currently on view at the museum will be open to the public as well.
The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts donated more than 150 original Polaroid portraits by Warhol — many of which were used by Warhol to create his iconic paintings and screen prints — to the museum in 2008. Lawrence Fong, the exhibition’s curator and curator of American and regional art at the museum, knew Van Sant also used Polaroids when casting for his earlier films and contacted Van Sant to see if he would be interested in doing an exhibition joining the two artists’ photos together.
“Van Sant was curious about the comparison and offered me access to his work,” Fong said, adding, “It’s fascinating to see how a simple act of making a Polaroid portrait, in the hands of Warhol and Van Sant, is transformed into the artwork they’re known for creating. Also, there are nuances and complexities in their portraits that share their regard for identity and sexuality.”
The hundreds of Polaroids include portraits of actors that were not cast in Van Sant’s films, such as Daniel Day Lewis, Charlize Theron and Johnathan Rhys Meyer, as well as shots of some of the objects that made Warhol an art star, such as bananas, soup cans and shoes.
In addition to the Polaroid portraits, many screen prints and several short films from both artists will be shown as key elements in the exhibit, including Warhol’s “Blow Job” (1964),  “Screen Test #1 through #4” (1964-66), and three of Van Sant’s films based on the Beat writings of William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, entitled “Discipline of D.E.” (1982), “Thanksgiving Prayer” (1991) and “The Ballad of Skeletons” (1997).
The exhibit is based on the idea of identity, a subject on which both artists’ work is largely based. Jill Hartz, the executive director of the museum, considers this show to be especially relevant to the college environment.
“Identity — looking at who we are and how we represent ourselves as individuals and as members of a culture or subculture — is a perennial subject for artists and is a core interest for students, who are exploring their place in the world,” Hartz said.
The exhibit will be on view until September and has jump-started several months of lectures and film screenings that take a closer look at the importance of identity. Gus Van Sant himself will lecture on Wednesday, May 19 at 6:00 p.m. in Lawrence 177, and the art museum will show Andy Warhol’s “Vinyl,” the first filmed version of Anthony Burgess’s novel “A Clockwork Orange” on June 2 at 5:30 p.m.
Organizers of the exhibit hope students and members of the community will appreciate and enjoy the comparisons made between Warhol and Van Sant’s portraits.
“I hope that students will be interested in Van Sant’s and Warhol’s exploration of the fluidity of identity — that we can take on different personae, different sexual preferences and in other ways experiment with who we are and might want to be,” Hartz said. “I think it’s dangerous to think that we know everything about ourselves or have attached ourselves to an identity that we want to protect, rather than keeping our boundaries open so we can
keep growing.”
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