Andy Warhol

Birth Name:

Andrew Warhola

Birth Date:

August 6, 1928

Birth Place:

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Death Date:

February 22, 1987

Place of Death:

New York Hospital, New York, New York

Age:

Cause of Death:

Post-operative cardiac arrhythmia

Cemetery Name:

St. John the Baptist Byzantine Catholic Cemetery

Claim to Fame:

Artists

Andy Warhol was an American artist, film director, and producer who was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as the Pop Art movement. Like his contemporaries Robert Rauschenberg and Roy Lichtenstein, Warhol wryly responded to the mass media of the 1960s. His silkscreen-printed paintings of cultural and consumer icons, featuring Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor, as well as Campbell's Soup cans and Brillo boxes, would make him one of the most famous artists of his generation. Before becoming a pop icon, Warhol graduated from the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1949, moving to New York to pursue a career in commercial illustration. Warhol's illustrations for editorials like Vogue and Glamour during the 1950s led him to financial success. In 1964, Warhol rented a studio loft on East 47th Street in Midtown Manhattan, which was later known as the Factory. Quick to realize the cult of celebrity, the Factory acted as a hub for fashionable movie stars, models, and artists who became fodder for his prints and films, as well as a performance venue for The Velvet Underground. The prolific artist worked across painting, sculpture, and new media throughout the 1960s and 1970s.

Fun Facts

After his death, the artist’s estate became The Andy Warhol Foundation and in 1994, a museum dedicated to the artist and his oeuvre opened in his native Pittsburgh. Today, his works are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and the Tate Gallery in London, among others.

Did you know Andy was shot during an assassination attempt? Warhol was chatting on the phone at the Factory when Valerie Solanas (prostitute and budding artist in the Warhol orbit) fired the first shot from her Beretta. Warhol first realized what was happening, and before she fired the second shot he yelled, “Valerie! Don’t do it! No! No!” Only the third bullet hit him, but it was a true shot, entering under his right armpit and exiting through his right lung. At Columbus Hospital, Warhol was declared clinically dead for two minutes. Years later Solanas once remarked “I should have done target practice.”

Cemetery Information:

Final Resting Place:

St. John the Baptist Byzantine Catholic Cemetery

1066 Connor Road

Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, 15102

USA

North America

Grave Location:

Warhola Family Plot

Grave Location Description

From the cemetery entrance on Connor Road, make a right and follow the road around to the left and drive 200 feet to the Figment camera pole on the left and park. Walk to the right across the street from the camera pole and go up 5 rows and slightly to the left to find the final resting place of Andy Warhol.