Dan Addison

Through September 18, visitors to UVA’s Fralin Museum of Art have the opportunity to view an “icon”-ic presentation.

After the Andy Warhol Foundation donated several Warhol pieces to the Fralin in 2014, Curator of Exhibitions Rebecca Schoenthal (Grad ’98, ’05) began researching Warhol’s silk screen of a 15th-century painting of the martyr Saint Apollonia. The piece helped inspire the museum’s current exhibit, Andy Warhol: Icons.

“He painted this Saint Apollonia in the figure of an icon, and that made me start thinking about what an icon is,” Schoenthal says. (She also secured the original “Saint Apollonia,” on loan from the National Gallery of Art in Washington.) “Warhol worked with contemporary celebrity icons like Marilyn Monroe, Liza Minnelli … and Warhol himself has become an icon.”

Several of Warhol’s celebrity portraits are on display, as well as pieces from his “Cowboys and Indians” series and his “Reigning Queens” series, which depicts four queens who reigned simultaneously: Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom, Queen Margrethe II of Denmark, Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands and Queen Ntombi of Swaziland. Warhol coated three of these portraits in diamond dust.

Schoenthal is also serving as the museum’s co-interim director in the wake of former head Bruce Boucher’s departure in May to be the director of Sir John Soane’s Museum in London. A search for Boucher’s replacement, through a committee led by Architect for the University Alice Raucher, is underway.