Andy Warhol made very few alterations to the source material for this screenprint—a photograph from Life magazine (in fact, the photographer would later sue the artist for unauthorized use of his work). Warhol simply enlarged and reversed the original image, which was published in a May 1963 photo essay about police dogs attacking civil rights demonstrators in Birmingham, Alabama. Although several of Warhol’s series of the early 1960s touched on current events, the subject of Birmingham Race Riot (and thirteen related silkscreen paintings, made subsequently) is uncommonly political for him. Yet despite the photograph’s disturbing depiction of an African American man besieged by police dogs, Warhol’s deadpan presentation of the appropriated photograph makes the tone of his work ambiguous and difficult to gauge.
Not on view
Date
1964
Classification
Prints
Medium
Screenprint
Dimensions
Sheet: 20 × 24in. (50.8 × 61 cm)
Accession number
96.53.5
Edition
102/500
Publication
Printed by Ives-Sillman, Inc.; printed by Sirocco Screenprints, Inc.; published by Wadsworth Atheneum
Credit line
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Transfer, from the Frances Mulhall Achilles Library, Special Collections, Whitney Museum of American Art
Rights and reproductions
© The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Part of a series:
Ten Works by Ten Painters
10 works
