The Jumex Museum presents a pretty wide range of pieces from the Andy Warhol collection – the Dark Star Collection,  and I feel it is definitely worth the visit on several levels.  The Deja vous I experienced was pretty strong though unexpected.  Having been through the Andy Warhol Museum in my stomping grounds of Pittsburgh several times, I could almost smell and feel what it was like when I had gone through the exhibits then.  

I love the space given to the various exhibitions, from the top level to the bottom.  The prohibition of photography is not a actually limiting, as it seems with Warhol you can take this with you where ever you go.  I was pulled into the memory of the Art Fair at ASF in the Fall of 2013 when all of ASF spied look-alikes of Andy Warhol across the campus (check out page 26-27 of the Focus).

I like the fact that Warhol was perhaps one of the most misunderstood artists of his time, and little did many realize this repetition, blandness, controversial coverages, as well as what seemed at first simplistic reproductions actually mimicked and called out for a closer look at our society at the time. Warhol strikes me as the Rolling Stone and Madonna of his period, not afraid to shake things up alot, and certainly not afraid to put his responses to how he saw all around him on display.

The exhibit at the Jumex does a superb job with the space to show several periods of his life as it progressed from his immersion into New York to The Factory. I like that this exhibit does cover so much of what we knew and didn’t know about Warhol, and leaves you with information to research further.  The whole incidents surrounding his near fatal death (he was dead clinically for a period of time) involving the fanatical SCUM organization, to the Silver phase of his life, (coolly represented in the Jumex on the bottom floor), all help represent Warhol’s method of shaking things up in a period that art seemed to be in a holding pattern.

Finally, the area around the Jumex is quite amazing.  As if the free fruit boxes and access to umbrellas while you waited was not enough,  it is worth the line (try to go early) but when you step out and look out all four sides of the Jumex, you do realize how the views seem to be postcard-like if you step back

and take in what the views really are in front of you.  I think the same can be said of Andy Warhol’s pieces, both graphic, sometimes undetectedly deeper than you realize, and a reflection of society in a variety of ways without having to impose variety at all at times.