The Archives Collection at The Andy Warhol Museum is the greatest collection of ephemera from a single artist ever assembled and forms a key part of Andy Warhol’s creative output. Alongside Warhol’s art, the Archives is integral to the museum’s storytelling. Containing more than 8,000 cubic feet of material, the Archives Collection documents the forty years of Warhol’s artistic career, as well as his family, early life, and the broader culture in which he lived.
The Archives Collection stands out due to the extensive scope and enormous quantity of objects saved by Warhol, who amassed well over 500,000 individual objects during his life. The Archives’ contents are sweeping—artworks, art supplies, source material, exhibition and film promotions, scrapbooks, press clippings, a complete run of Interview magazine, hundreds of decorative art objects, almost 14,000 prints and negatives, 851 reel-to-reels and 2,590 cassette tapes, and numerous personal items, such as correspondence, diaries, clothing, wigs, and cosmetics.
The keystone of the Archives Collection is Warhol’s largest serial artwork, the Time Capsules, Capsules, which provides a unique view into Warhol’s private world and American culture of his lifetime. From 1974 until his death in 1987, Warhol filled 610 mostly standard-sized cardboard boxes with an astonishing quantity of material that passed through his life. Once the box was full, Warhol sealed it with tape and stored it. Contents of each Time Capsule are a mystery until staff unseal a box and catalog them in the Archives.
The museum’s Archives contains primary source material not found anywhere else in the world. It is the leading resource for information about Warhol and offers invaluable contributions to the study of the arts, media, and the evolution of American culture. The Andy Warhol Museum is charged with the crucial responsibility for stewarding the Archives Collection’s care and accessibility so that it remains a resource for people of today and tomorrow.
