Andy Warhol

Birmingham Race Riot
1964

Black and white photo of a confrontation between a police officer and a group of people.
Black and white photo of a confrontation between a police officer and a group of people.

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

API
artworks/10301

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.

Part of a series:
Ten Works by Ten Painters
10 works

Black and white photo of a confrontation between a police officer and a group of people.
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Andy Warhol
975 works in the collection

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