What’s in a box?

You may know of Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes, but have you heard of his Time Capsules? Almost 50 years ago, in 1974, Warhol began collecting all sorts of ephemera from his everyday life – whether it’s the valuable artworks made by himself or his friends, unpaid bills, newspaper clippings, invoices, photographs or personal letters – and kept them in cardboard boxes and other containers. Not simply used for storage purposes, Warhol considered these boxes to be works of art which were later called Time Capsules, and by his passing in 1987, he ended up filling 610 of them. As perhaps one of the most underrated serial Warhol works, there’s a lot to be gleaned from them about both Andy Warhol, an enigmatic Pop artist, and Andrew Warhola, an introvert from a working-class family. 

One of these boxes and its contents are on view now at the AGO as part of I AM HERE: Home Movies and Everyday Masterpieces, on loan from The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Time Capsule -2 contains more than 595 objects dating back to the late 1960s. Wanting to learn more about Time Capsule -2 and the others in the series, we connected with someone who is more than familiar with them: Matt Gray, Manager of Archives at the Andy Warhol Museum. While installing I AM HERE, Gray shared with us his insights about what Warhol kept hidden in his Time Capsules.  

The following interview has been edited for length. 

AGOinsider: Can you describe what we’re looking at?

Gray: You're looking at one of 610 individual vessels that Warhol compiled over the course of about 15 years, called Time Capsules. There is a wide variety of content within the 610 boxes. They are compiled from everyday materials like magazines, newspapers, bills, legal documents, personal correspondence from his family and business paperwork. Warhol made these Time Capsules in his studio, so there are also artworks, art materials, exhibition announcements and more. The box here at AGO [as part of I AM HERE], titled Time Capsule -2, is full of materials that are mostly from around 1968, even though he compiled the box sometime later.

Warhol viewed the Time Capsules as a series of artworks, and they are his largest serial works, more so than the Marilyns or the Campbell Soup Cans. Even though he titled them, he never gave them specific numbers. The numbers were assigned to the time capsules after Warhol died by the Andy Warhol Foundation, as a way to place them in somewhat of a chronological sequence. 

Warhol didn't touch every box, but he did contribute to compiling the objects. In most instances, his studio assistants were making these artworks. One of the first few jobs that a new studio assistant would have would be to sweep the studio and office -- Warhol was very adamant about sweeping -- and another was to assemble the Time Capsules. Sometimes, Warhol would have a loose description of what he wanted to see put in the boxes, but it was never that regimented. His assistants were putting things in and there were boxes all throughout his office, his studio and he would occasionally bring things from home which contributed to the diversity of the content.

Looking through the boxes, you can see odd instances where Warhol opened the boxes after they were sealed. He even plays around and moves things from one box to another. He mentioned in his diaries that he went through one of the boxes and felt regretful about that because it’s sort of like going back in time. 

Installation view: I AM HERE: Home Movies and Everyday Masterpieces, April 13 - August 14, 2022. Art Gallery of Ontario. Artwork: Andy Warhol, Time Capsule -2, c. 1968. The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Founding Collection, Contribution The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. © 2022 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SOCAN

They weren’t supposed to be just a snapshot of a static period in time. Warhol’s original intention was to sell each box as artwork, at initially about $4,000 a pop. The buyer could only buy them “sight unseen”, meaning you could not see what the contents were. You could either be getting a one-of-a-kind artwork, personal information about Warhol or even artwork made by some of his friends, like Jean-Michel Basquiat or Keith Haring. Or you could be getting unpaid bills, dirty underwear or random news clippings that Warhol found interesting. 

Luckily for us and for scholarship purposes, the boxes never got sold. We have the complete range of the Time Capsule series. Also, museums [and independent researchers] can take a couple of pieces out of one box to gain context for larger Warhol artworks or context in Warhol’s life. They’re the most researched and understood portion of the [Warhol] Archives collection, mainly because they are so organized. While there are lots of important pieces in them, there are also lots of seemingly unimportant pieces. The more we learn about them, the more we can tie them together and understand how they relate to each other, how they relate to Warhol, his life, his artwork, and the greater cultural landscape. 

AGOinsider: The Warhol archives are held at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. Can you tell us about the public presentation of the content of these boxes? 

Gray: For a while, we had public openings of the Time Capsules, where the box would be brought on stage and there would be an audience in attendance. The archivist would then open the box up, pull objects out and talk about them. Oftentimes, the archivists were accompanied by a former assistant of Warhol. Specifically, I'm thinking about Benjamin Liu, who was with Warhol in the 1980s. The assistants were able to speak about how they experienced being with Warhol through what they're seeing in the box. 

But in terms of exhibiting at the Warhol Museum, the Archives collection is so big that we can essentially have our smaller exhibitions within the larger overall exhibition at the museum.

The Time Capsules are the keystone of the collection, but they're not the whole collection. One box can have one object in it, and another can have over 1,000 objects. When [The Andy Warhol Museum] acquired the [Warhol] estate, the time capsules were acquired, as well as every other object in Andy Warhol's home. In total, we have approximately 500,000 individual objects, probably we're getting closer to a million, but we haven't had an accurate, itemized count, because that will be insane trying to count everything. We can exhibit [the Time Capsules] based on what exhibitions are at the museum currently, or we can have smaller, breakout ones that focus on a specific period of Warhol's life because of the diversity within them. 

AGOinsider: As someone who is familiar with these works and Warhol’s ideas behind them, what do they tell you about Warhol as an artist?

Gray: I do have an understanding of who he is that not a lot of people have an opportunity to. What I've really learned is that as intelligent and insightful as Warhol was, he didn't create his artwork in a vacuum, he was part of a cultural movement. He knew a good idea when he heard one, and he oftentimes took it and ran with it, but always made it his own. With the Warhol collection, you can really trace everything from concept, execution to the final product. But you can also trace his personal life and daily movements. He kept a very detailed log of his daily activities, like who his friends were, and what artwork he was seeing. And he was also a huge documentarian, in terms of photography, and tape recordings which again, wasn't his idea. He borrowed that from someone else. 

Luckily for us, how he recorded everything so diligently allowed the collection to become its own sort of time capsule. The complicated part is that he didn't always leave a breadcrumb of naming who was in his photographs or who was on his audiotapes. As an archivist and researcher, you have to fill in the gaps. 

I AM HERE: Home Movies and Everyday Masterpieces is on now at the AGO through August 14. Stay tuned for more stories and art from the exhibition on AGOinsider.