1st Extravaganza | Where’s Warhol
“Elsewhere is converting its museum into all things Warhol from 8 p.m. Saturday until 11 a.m. Sunday. The 15-hour extravaganza includes an evening of banana drinks and Campbell’s koozies, screen tests, photo booths, all-night disco, a Velvet Underground cover band (undercover), Table 16 treats and brunch the morning after with visiting art superstars. Tickets $75.” Greensboro News and Record, 9/9/09
Elsewhere’s very first Extravaganza on Saturday, October 3rd, 2009 (our 11th was in 2019!) came out of celebrating the first-time receipt of funding support from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. A fundraiser in conjunction with Elsewhere’s receiving a grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation.
Leading up to the event, a Warhol impersonator was spotted all around Greensboro, followed by a tableau of Campbell’s soup cans, bananas, and shoes in Elsewhere’s front window.
The event featured screen prints of Andy wearing a Where’s Waldo cap, video screen tests, Factory-style haircuts by Kyle from Salon Blu on the back stairs, Studio 54 disco dancing, a Banana Bar, the Velvet Undercover Band, as well as “Chelsea Hotel,” “Warhol Library,” “Call Andy,” “Get Your Warhol On,” and “Where’s Warhol? Find other spaces with Warhol support.”
From the night’s program:
“Andy Warhol transformed popular culture into artistic consumption, and boldly predicted, ‘Someday all department stores will become museums.’ Surrounded by over six decades of cultural excess, we have seized Andy’s prophecy as a challenge to re-define our era of artistic and cultural production. Through a rich investigation of site, history, material, community interaction, and urban growth, Elsewhere has turned a simple, however implausible idea, ‘a store where nothing’s for sale,’ into a local and national landmark: a ‘living museum.’”
From co-founder, Stephanie Sherman:
“Everything I can remember about the Where's Warhol extravaganza makes it one of the most tremendous celebrations of all time.
Everyone was there: donors and fancy museum members, he Cultural Secretary of NC, musicians and artists we gave free tickets to, a few homeless folk from the street who we invited in. Table16 (what was then the restaurant on the corner) provided heaps of food. We tin foiled the bathroom with silver aluminum foil and there was a dancing takeover of the bathroom late into the evening. Mannequins were decked out in the most glitz we could find. Screen Tests were ongoing in the tent. Agustina Woodgate and Ian Montgomery were selling T-Shirts stenciled with the Fabulon logo, a gloss which they had used to coat the floors of the Glass Forest.”
Elsewhere’s July 2009 Newsletter announcing the Warhol Funding.
"Andy Warhol also used an early video camera that Norelco loaned him in 1965 to video Billy Name giving Edie Sedgwick a haircut on the fire escape of the Factory."
"Andy and I were hanging around together. I had an apartment on the Lower East Side, where I had haircutting salons... I was famous for giving haircuts, so he said, 'Would you let me do a film of you doing haircuts?' - Billy Name
