Month: July 2019

Andy Warhol–Fifty Years Later

Adele Fasick3 Comments

This week I saw the exhibit Andy Warhol — From A to B and Back Again at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. In that large museum the art works stretch out over three floors and many galleries and include not only Warhol’s famous pictures but also some of the films that he and his associates produced.

3D rendering by steelblue for SFMOMA

For me it was a reminder of my first glimpse of the Warhol world back in 1966. We were living in New Jersey then, near Rutgers University and tantalizingly close to the glamor of Manhattan just a few miles away. The university was a lifeline that gave suburban housewives like me a glimpse of that glamor. I remember the evening when a friend and I went to a Warhol event on campus (our husbands stayed home with our preschoolers) to watch some flickering films and see a new group called The Velvet Underground.

We arrived to find a crowd waiting at the door. A heavily made-up girl in a floppy brimmed felt hat was taking moving pictures of the audience as they entered. A long-haired, paunchy man followed her around while she aimed her camera to take close-up views of the people’s eyes, faces, lips. At one point she sat on someone’s lap to photograph a face. 

When the audience had settled in, the films were shown. One was Vinyl, which featured the beautiful actress, Edie Sedgwick. Undergraduates hooted and made rude comments as she appeared on screen drinking glass after glass of wine and finally ended the film crouching over a toilet.

After the movie, the Velvet Underground went on stage. Some of the performers played, one sang, a couple danced at the side. The loudspeakers were turned so high that the music was deafening—our seats vibrated with the force of the sound. Behind the singers, the movie screen showed flickering pictures of the performer’s face, hair, lips, eyes…

Velvet Underground

All this was new and eye-opening to us and to most of the audience in 1966.  My friend and I went home with headaches from the noise, but satisfied that we had caught a glimpse of the future with Andy Warhol and his fabulous friends.

One advantage of living a long life is having a chance to discover how often what seems to be a foreshadowing of the future turns out to be a dud, while other startling changes affect our lives for years to come. Warhol’s influence has certainly not diminished. His paintings brought daily life into the realm of art. We started looking at everyday objects with new eyes. And his films and music have changed the way we have listened and looked at entertainment for more than half a century. Seeing his work now reminds us of how much he meant to all of us.

Museums sometimes seem out of the mainstream, preserving artifacts from places, cultures and times that may seem distant. But the moments they preserve are vital to understanding how the world changes. I for one am eternally grateful for museums and the people who work in them. They increase our knowledge and broaden our view of the world.

I recently read that some museum staff members in many cities are unionizing amid complaints that they do not get paid enough for their work. All of us who care about preserving our society and enriching our lives ought to support funding for museums and their workers. They make our lives better by showing us where we have been and how we got to where we are now.

Equal Pay for Equal Scores—treat female athletes right

Adele Fasick4 Comments

The United States Women’s Soccer team earned a well-deserved surge of publicity this week when it returned to New York as world champions for the fourth year in a row. Thousands of girls around the country undoubtedly watched the welcome parade and dreamed of a possible future for themselves as they celebrated the women’s victory. But we should remember that the women have still not won their struggle to get pay equal to male soccer players. It has taken a century for women athletes to get as far as this, but there is still work to be done.

U.S. Women’s Soccer Team

Over the years women have been pressured to stay out of sports and let the men do all the active work and get all the credit. The Olympic Games have only slowly and reluctantly welcomed women into competition. America’s first female Olympic champion was Margaret Ives Abbott. She was a young society woman from Chicago who played golf for pleasure and was very good at it. In 1900, she was in Paris studying art and heard there was a golf contest, so she signed up. That was the first year that golf had been part of the Olympic program and for a many years it was the only time. Not until 2006 was golf reintroduced as an Olympic sport. Margaret Abbott may have been a champion, but scarcely anyone noticed her achievement.

The first time the Olympic Games were held in the United States—in St. Louis in 1904—the only sport open for women was archery. Those games were among the most informal and disorganized of games because very few athletes were willing to make the long trek to St. Louis to participate.

Women’s Olympic swim team 1912

As the twentieth century went on, more and more women took up athletics and lobbied for a chance to compete in the Games. Some of the obstacles for women athletes were bizarre. In 1912 when the Games were held in Stockholm, women were allowed to participate in swimming, but America did not send any of its female swimmers. The reason? American organizers would not allow women to compete in any sport in which they could not wear long skirts. Although, as you can see from this picture, the swimsuits of 1912 were very modest by today’s standards.

Now at last the Olympic organization is working to make sure the 2020 Games will be equally divided between male and female athletes. This chart shows how the number of women participating and the sports they have chosen have changed over the years.

Professional sports seems to be a last bastion where women athletes are treated unfairly with lower salaries and fewer perks. Now that the excitement of the World Cup is over, let’s not forget Megan Rapinoe and the rest of the team. As their fight for equal pay fades from media coverage, we need to keep reminding the U.S. Soccer Federation and other overlords of athletic organizations that women do care about sports and we want to support women athletes.