Press Release The Warhol Announces Plans to Reopen in Late June

For immediate release

Wednesday, June 10, 2020

The Andy Warhol Museum plans to reopen in late June, with timed ticketing and other safety protocols in place to welcome back the community and protect staff. The Warhol will reopen to all visitors on Monday, June 29, 2020, and to only Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh members from Friday, June 26, through Sunday, June 28, 2020. Timed ticketing will be available at warhol.org starting on Monday, June 15, 2020. The Warhol has been closed since Saturday, March 14, 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Along with all of the Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh, The Andy Warhol Museum has put together a careful plan to ensure that our community can safely return to our museum,” said Patrick Moore, director of The Warhol. “We look forward to welcoming visitors to a space that meets government guidelines while still providing the lively, high quality experience that Pittsburgh has come to expect from The Warhol.”

The steps The Warhol is taking to be visitor-ready include: limiting the number of visitors to 25% of the building capacity at any one time; the use of timed ticketing for all visitors, including members; clearly marked foot-traffic patterns in high-traffic areas; enhanced cleaning protocols; the modification of interactive exhibitions where possible and placement of hand sanitizers near interactive exhibitions; and the installation of plexiglass shields at visitor services desks and in office spaces. Visitors and staff will be required to wear masks and practice safe social distancing. The Warhol Store will be open using the same safety guidelines and the reopening date for The Warhol Café will be announced separately.

The Femme Touch exhibition, originally scheduled to open on April 24, 2020, will open on Friday, June 26, 2020 and be on view through Sunday, January 3, 2021. This museum-wide exhibition is centered around the women and femmes who were intertwined with Andy Warhol’s life and career. Femme Touch is presented by Bank of America and Steven Alan Bennett and Dr. Elaine Melotti Schmidt, Founders of The Bennett Collection of Women Realists.

At the start of its COVID-19 closure, The Warhol joined with a group of other museums and cultural institutions from across Southwestern Pennsylvania to collaboratively prepare their organizations for safe reopenings. The group started meeting digitally in late March, and it now includes more than 30 different museums and arts organizations that span Allegheny, Westmoreland, and Fayette Counties that meet weekly to share plans and discuss key elements of reopening, including visitor guidelines, facilities, staff and volunteers, and diversity and equity issues.

While this group convened for the purpose of collaborating on best practices for reopening, those meetings have opened the door for other vital collaborative efforts, such as addressing the group’s support for racial equity and ending the cycle of violence and oppression affecting Black members of the community.

The Warhol receives state arts funding support through a grant from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, a state agency funded by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania; the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency; and The Heinz Endowments. Further support is provided by the Allegheny Regional Asset District.

The Andy Warhol Museum

Located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the place of Andy Warhol’s birth, The Andy Warhol Museum holds the largest collection of Warhol’s artworks and archival materials and is one of the most comprehensive single-artist museums in the world. The Warhol is one of the four Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh.

Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh

Established in 1895 by Andrew Carnegie, Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh is a collection of four distinctive museums: Carnegie Museum of Art, Carnegie Museum of Natural History, Carnegie Science Center, and The Andy Warhol Museum. The museums reach more than 1.4 million people a year through exhibitions, educational programs, outreach activities, and special events.