Ace Gallery is a recurring exhibition setting in the diaries, linked to openings in Vancouver and Los Angeles’s Venice neighborhood. The gallery matters not only as a place where Warhol showed work, but as a stage for the machinery surrounding an exhibition: travel and publicity, crowds and signatures, interviews, celebrity encounters, and the practical effort of getting the artist through a packed opening.

A stop on the touring itinerary

On November 24, 1976, Warhol recorded the end of a trip that had taken him from the Seattle Art Museum opening to Los Angeles for Marisa Berenson’s wedding and then to Vancouver for an Ace Gallery opening. The entry places the gallery within a sequence of appearances and journeys rather than describing the exhibition itself. After getting up at seven in the morning, Warhol cabbed to the airport and reflected on the Vancouver art scene, saying that people there did not buy art and were not interested in painting.

The Vancouver stop also appears through the company and conversation surrounding it. Catherine Guinness repeatedly asked Warhol what Pop Art was, a question that frustrated him during a two-hour flight. He compared her persistence to an earlier interview in which she had repeatedly asked what soul food was. The anecdote makes the gallery visit part of a broader itinerary of interviews, openings, and public explanation: Warhol was traveling to exhibit art while also being asked to define the kind of art he made. After returning to New York, he had an early Thanksgiving dinner with Jed Johnson before the next morning’s drive to Chadds Ford.

The crowded Venice opening

In February 1977, the diary follows preparations for an Ace Gallery opening in Venice. A camera crew filmed Warhol and Doug Christmas in a limousine on the way there. Before reaching the gallery, they visited Tony Bill’s apartment in a building across from it, an incidental detail that fixes the exhibition within a neighborhood of nearby homes and businesses as well as art spaces.

The opening itself drew a crowd large enough to wait around the block. Warhol and Russell Means signed Russell Means posters, while Viva and Paul Morrissey were also present, along with some of the Cockettes, whom Warhol described as people from the old days. The event combined the display of Warhol’s work with a public encounter: visitors queued to get inside, and the artist’s presence became part of what the crowd had come to see.

That demand also became tiring. Warhol spent the afternoon signing posters and left at five, rather than remain at the gallery. The entry continues beyond the opening into the surrounding social circuit: he went for a drink at Cheryl Tiegs and Stan Dragoti’s home, then later encountered Annie Leibovitz and Jann Wenner in a hotel lobby. The opening thus appears as one point in a tightly scheduled Los Angeles day, but the queue and hours of signing mark it as an unusually intense public engagement.

The Torso show and its audience

In September 1978, Warhol returned to Venice for his Torso show at Ace Gallery. On September 23, Wendy Stark drove him there on a sunny day when the temperature reached 100 degrees, though the air was dry. Warhol said the show looked good and described its explicit subject matter; the gallery had also prepared 1,000 copies of Interview to give away. The account places the exhibition’s visual content beside a large-scale distribution of the magazine, making the opening a meeting point for art, publishing, and promotion.

Warhol gave two interviews that day, one for Connoisseur and one for Society West, with Wendy taking part. Fred Hughes turned the subject of the work into a joke, falsely telling people that a shaved-vagina image in one painting was Wendy’s. The anecdote records how the interviews could become an extension of the gallery’s social performance: the work supplied the subject, while the people accompanying Warhol shaped the story told about it.

The following day, the crowd grew to 3,500. Warhol and his party picked up Ursula Andress before going to Venice, where he was pulled through the crowd. The diary records the guests’ striking clothes, including Marisa Berenson’s gold sequined beret and jacket and skin-tight black pants, and Sue Mengers’s flowing hot-pink chiffon gown. Once the crowd had gathered, arrangements were made to get Warhol quickly into his car and take him to Robert’s, the beachside restaurant where the party was being held. The sequence shows the gallery opening spilling beyond the exhibition space: the crowds made entry and movement difficult, and the celebration continued at another venue.

Exhibition as spectacle

Across these visits, Ace Gallery is represented through specific signs of public attention rather than through a description of its architecture or administration. The entries emphasize who traveled to an opening, what they did there, how many people attended, and how the event had to be managed. The shift from a Vancouver opening that Warhol associated with limited interest in painting to Venice crowds waiting around the block, and then to 3,500 visitors at the Torso show, gives the gallery’s appearances a changing scale.

The repeated details also reveal how an exhibition became an event around the artworks. Posters were signed; Interview copies were handed out; cameras filmed the journey; reporters conducted interviews; and a crowd could turn the simple act of moving through the venue into a logistical problem. At the Torso opening, the gallery’s audience was so large that Warhol was hurried from the crowd to a car and onward to a beachside party. Ace Gallery therefore occupies the diaries as both an exhibition venue and a public arena where art, celebrity, media, and social spectacle converged.