The opening of Andy Warhol and Jamie Wyeth’s portrait exhibition at Cheekwood, in Nashville on January 30, 1977, became an improvised encounter between an art event and the public image of its best-known exhibitor. Warhol went there with Catherine Guinness expecting a tour and a meal; instead, visitors mistook a staircase crowd for a receiving line and kept him signing autographs for an hour and a half. The exhibition’s recorded story is less about the portraits themselves than about how quickly a museum visit could turn into a performance of celebrity.

The opening in Nashville

The exhibition was scheduled to open at six. Before then, a tour organizer took Warhol and Catherine Guinness around Cheekwood’s Fine Arts Center. They were hungry and tried to get hot dogs, but the organizer hurried them along. The diary records no descriptions of the portraits on display; its focus shifts from the exhibition to the movements and misunderstandings surrounding its opening.

The staircase had been brought from England, and a popcorn machine stood at its top. Warhol and Catherine climbed up to get popcorn, eating and talking as people gathered along the stairs. Only then did they realize that the visitors thought the line was forming to meet Warhol, having spotted him at the top. An architectural feature and a snack stop had inadvertently become the setting for a public reception.

An accidental receiving line

Warhol and Catherine filled bags with popcorn and tried to leave. When someone asked for a bag, Warhol gave one away. The small exchange did not end the gathering: he wound up signing autographs for an hour and a half before dinner was served. The sequence turns on a change in expectation. What began as an attempt to get food during a guided tour became an extended encounter with visitors who had come, or believed they had come, to meet the artist.

The episode shows recognition operating as part of the opening itself. The crowd’s attention reorganized the visit around Warhol, while his willingness to give away popcorn and sign autographs kept the unplanned reception going. The diary preserves the incident through its practical details—the missed hot dogs, the staircase, the bags, the signatures—rather than through any account of speeches or formal proceedings.

Local guests and social positioning

A few local people attended, including Don Johnson, whom Warhol knew as an actor from Magic Garden of Stanley Sweetheart and as a friend of Phil Walden. The entry presents him as one of the recognizable guests at a gathering that combined a museum opening with the social world surrounding its visitors.

Suzie Frankfurt had traveled to Nashville and, in Warhol’s account, was social-climbing. She had written her thank-you notes before arriving. At the opening, she made the front page alongside Warhol, taking the place Catherine Guinness might have occupied had Catherine stepped forward more quickly. The contrast between advance preparation and Catherine’s hesitation gives the event a second, more deliberate kind of performance: alongside the accidental autograph line, guests were also navigating visibility and position.

Portraiture and celebrity

The opening took place during a period when portraiture was an important part of Warhol’s work and income. His broader portrait practice was carefully staged: he photographed sitters with a Polaroid Big Shot, selected images for screen printing, and adjusted the chosen image through cropping and cosmetic retouching. His method of aligning printed photographic detail with painted color could leave slight shifts in the finished image. These practices provide context for an exhibition devoted to portraits, though the diary does not specify how the particular works shown at Cheekwood were made.

The day’s account likewise makes celebrity visible not as an abstract reputation but as something enacted in a place and among a crowd. Visitors saw Warhol on the staircase and formed a line; a guest reached the front page beside him; the planned tour gave way to autographs. In that sense, the opening’s most fully documented portrait was the public one created around the artist himself.