Cheekwood was the Nashville setting for the January 30, 1977 opening of portraits by Andy Warhol and Jamie Wyeth. The Fine Arts Center hosted both the exhibition and an unexpectedly public encounter: visitors mistook Warhol at the top of a staircase for the start of a receiving line, and he ended up signing autographs for an hour and a half.

The Fine Arts Center and the opening

On Sunday, January 30, the tour organizer showed Warhol and Catherine Guinness around the Fine Arts Center at Cheekwood ahead of the 6:00 p.m. museum opening. They were hungry enough to try to get hot dogs, but the organizer hurried them onward. The building’s staircase, brought from England, became the scene’s defining feature. A popcorn machine stood at its top, where Warhol and Guinness stopped to eat and talk.

An accidental receiving line

From the staircase, Warhol and Guinness noticed people lined along the steps. The visitors had apparently seen Warhol at the top and assumed they were waiting in a receiving line to meet him. Warhol and Guinness filled bags with popcorn and tried to leave; when someone asked for a bag, Warhol gave it to them. That small act became the start of a much longer encounter: he stayed to sign autographs for an hour and a half, before dinner was served. The opening thus shifted from a guided museum visit into an informal public reception, organized not by the exhibition staff but by the visitors’ expectations and Warhol’s willingness to respond.

Portraiture and public presence

The opening presented portraits by Warhol and Jamie Wyeth, while the scene on the staircase showed how readily Warhol’s public identity could become part of an art event. His wider portrait practice depended on a carefully managed production process: he typically took about sixty Polaroid photographs of a sitter with a Polaroid Big Shot camera, selected four images for screen-printing preparation, then chose and cosmetically altered one image before enlarging it for transfer to canvas. Assistants prepared canvases in different flesh-toned backgrounds, and slight misalignments between painted color and the screened image produced the portraits’ characteristic visual shifts. This general method supplies context for Warhol’s portrait work, but the account of the Cheekwood opening does not specify how the works shown there were made.

A few local attendees came to the opening, including Don Johnson, whom Warhol knew through Phil Walden. Suzie Frankfurt also traveled to Nashville and appeared on the front page with Warhol; Catherine Guinness, the account suggests, did not step forward quickly enough to be pictured beside him. Cheekwood’s significance in this episode lies in the contrast between the formal museum occasion and its unscripted social life: the exhibition brought portraits into a public venue, while the staircase, popcorn, and prolonged signing made Warhol himself the focus of a second, improvised encounter.