Endangered Species (Andy Warhol art series)

Endangered Species (Andy Warhol art series) appeared at the American Museum of Natural History in an exhibition whose route and placement shaped the experience of encountering it. Warhol’s diary records the opening as a sequence of contrasts: a crowd that had gathered for a film rather than for the exhibition, and a show moved from the lobby into a small room reached only after passing through the dinosaur galleries.

Opening at the Museum

On April 12, 1983, Ron Feldman and his wife picked Warhol up in a limousine at four o’clock to take him to the opening. His attention caught on a detail of the trip: she wore plastic jewelry of the kind he had collected years earlier. The exhibition took place amid another kind of spectacle. A crowd outside the museum initially seemed to Warhol to have come for his show, but it was there because a Disney movie was being filmed. When the group left later, the film crew was chasing a large rat that had entered one of the actors’ trailers.

Placement and Display

The exhibition had originally been planned for the museum lobby, but was moved to a room farther inside. Visitors had to pass through the dinosaur rooms before reaching the small space where Warhol’s show was installed. Though the placement made the exhibition less immediately visible, Warhol judged the result beautiful: the works were presented in white frames. His account gives no further description of individual works, but makes the display’s physical setting central to the opening—the show was encountered not at the museum entrance, but at the end of a passage through its prehistoric galleries.