Houston

Houston enters the diary through a specific professional visit: on March 31, 1978, Andy Warhol traveled there for an exhibition of his Athletes portraits. The brief account makes the city a destination in the circulation of his work, and preserves a detail about the gallery that gives the stop its own character: it occupied a large, beautiful space in an old compound designed by Ian Glennie.

The 1978 Exhibition

The diary marks the journey under the heading “New York—Houston” and identifies its purpose as a show of Warhol’s Athletes portraits at the gallery of Frederika Hunter and Ian Glennie. The entry does not describe the individual portraits, the exhibition’s reception, or its duration; its emphasis is on the trip and the venue. Houston is thus recorded not as a general backdrop but as the place where this body of portrait work was presented.

The Gallery and Its Setting

Warhol describes the gallery as large and beautiful, set within an old compound. He adds that Ian Glennie designed the space. These details distinguish the exhibition site from a neutral display room: the diary briefly registers both the character of the existing setting and Glennie’s role in shaping the gallery within it. The account supplies no further description of the compound or its surroundings.

Portraiture in Context

The Houston show belonged to a sustained portrait practice. Warhol’s general procedure began with approximately sixty Polaroid photographs of a sitter, made with a Polaroid Big Shot camera. He selected four images for transfer to acetates, chose and cropped one, and cosmetically altered it before it was enlarged for silkscreening. Assistants prepared canvases with background colors, while Warhol traced and painted selected features beneath the printed image; slight differences in alignment produced the portraits’ characteristic shifting effect. The diary does not specify that every step applied to the Athletes portraits shown in Houston, but this account of his broader working method locates the exhibition within a practice built from photography, selection, retouching, and screenprinting. In the March 1978 entry, that extensive process is represented by a compact record of travel, exhibition, gallery, and designer.