655 Pennsylvania Avenue SE

Riddle #8: Saturday's Poppy
September 5 – October 5, 2022

Bonwit Teller, a luxury retailer of women's fashion in Manhattan that went bankrupt in 2000, became famous in the mid-20th century for hiring artists as window-dressers. Andy Warhol's 1961 window, realized a year before his breakout shows at Ferus Gallery in LA and Stable Gallery in New York, consisted of five of his own paintings presented as backdrops to female mannequens. Among them was "Saturday Popeye".

This project presents three surrogates, hand-painted by Triple Candie, that is based on a Warhol print made as the same year as "Saturday Popeye". Each is rendered in a different color combination. Also on view are a Savarin Coffee can withartistic implements (originally exhibited at the Telfair Museums in Savannah, Georgia), a religious figure made out of a crushed turkey pan, and mangled Cambell's soup cans. The props are installed on mirrored mylar with a hand-painted sign that reads, "This is not about Popeye." Visible in the doorway is a silver-painted gourd on a piece of silver fabric, atop a hand-carved, silver-painted box. The box was exhibited at the Portland Art Museum in Oregon as one half of a Richard Serra sculpture that was exhibited at the Portland Center for the Visual Arts in 1975.

Poppy is the name of Triple Candie's cat, a stray adopted in 2008 from a community garden on 143th Street in Harlem. He lives in Annapolis, Maryland.

 


 

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