Richmond, Virginia, is the setting for a December 1985 trip that turns a museum benefit into an encounter with memory and public performance. The journey, made because the Lewises had given a wing to a local museum, brought Andy Warhol face to face with a large gathering of people he associated with earlier years in New York; its formal events then required him to appear on live television, even as he felt dressed to leave rather than to stay.

The Journey and Its Occasion

Warhol and Fred Hughes flew from Butler Aviation to Richmond for the event connected with the Lewises’ museum gift. Warhol had expected a small party aboard the private plane, but found roughly a hundred people instead. The size of the gathering changed the trip before it had properly begun: what he anticipated as a contained visit had become a reunion with a broad social and artistic past.

The Lewises’ house served as the gathering point before the museum visit. Guests chatted there and changed into black tie, while Warhol remained in a turtleneck and his Calvin Klein coat with a hood. He noted that he looked as though he were about to leave all day, yet nobody seemed to find his appearance unusual. Richmond thus emerges not through a description of its streets or institutions, but through the tightly scheduled social passage from private aviation to a donor’s home and onward to the museum.

A Gathering That Revived the Past

The crowd produced what Warhol called a creepy feeling, strong enough that he told Fred Hughes he wanted to go home. Corice Arman, on seeing the people, expressed the same reaction. The encounter with Mr. and Mrs. Philip Pearlstein made the past especially immediate: it recalled 1949, when Warhol had first come to New York by bus with the Pearlsteins. In Richmond, a present-day cultural occasion briefly became a return to the beginning of his New York life.

Among the people on the plane, Lucas Samaras was the only one Warhol felt like talking to. Samaras said he still lived in the same old place, complicating Warhol’s assumption that the people he remembered had all become rich. Their conversation turned to Julian Schnabel: Samaras was putting him down, and Warhol told Samaras that he had been the Schnabel of twenty years earlier. The comparison connected the gathering’s older art-world reputations to its newer ones, while Warhol’s account of Schnabel’s selective handshakes sharpened his observation of status and changing advantage within the art scene.

Ceremony and Public Appearance

At the Lewises’ house, Warhol learned that he would have to appear live on television at six o’clock. The prospect made him nervous at first; then he stopped caring and got it over with. His account gives little detail about the broadcast itself, but records the change from apprehension to matter-of-fact completion. Richmond’s public appearance is therefore registered less as a ceremonial triumph than as an obligation absorbed into the day’s itinerary.

The contrast between the black-tie preparations and Warhol’s hooded coat captures his position at the event: physically present among donors and cultural figures, but dressed as if he might depart at any moment. That look echoed his earlier wish to go home, while the live broadcast placed him before an audience he could not simply avoid. In the diary, Richmond holds these tensions together—the pull of an unexpected return to the past, the social machinery of a museum occasion, and Warhol’s practiced movement through public attention.