Andy Warhol Family Album at the Whitney Museum

Andy Warhol Family Album, on the seventh floor of the Whitney Museum of American Art, gathers Polaroids the artist took in 1972 and 1973. It runs from April 30 to October 19, 2026, so only a few days remain.

Warhol (1928–1987) reshaped what it meant to be an artist in an age saturated with images, borrowing methods from mass media. Photography sat at the center of his interest in self-representation: he carried a camera almost everywhere and made hundreds of thousands of pictures. He bought his first Polaroid camera in the mid-1960s, and by the early 1970s it was his preferred tool. He used both the Big Shot, with its fixed lens and strong flash suited to close-ups, and the more portable, flexible SX-70. The cameras supplied the first stage of his commissioned silkscreen portraits, and they also let him document his own life almost compulsively.

The works on view come from one of six Holson albums that Warhol kept as a personal archive, calling them his "family album" after the generic product name. This volume holds hundreds of snapshots of collaborators, celebrities and friends. Some are posed portraits, others are candid pictures of guests at his Montauk, Long Island, house; there are also records of trips to Europe and photographs of his dog Archie. The museum's lead image, from 1973, shows a bespectacled figure holding a small dachshund puppy to their chest.

In the galleries, the small instant prints are hung in dense grids on the walls, and an album is also displayed in a glass case. One installation view shows the display near Warhol's 1963 Ethel Scull 36 Times, setting the intimate scale of the Polaroids beside his better-known silkscreen work.

The show belongs to a Whitney initiative to present rarely seen works from its own collection, following exhibitions devoted to Wanda Gág, Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe and Claes Oldenburg. It was organized by Jennie Goldstein and Roxanne Smith, with significant support from Susan and John Hess.