SUNY Potsdam's Warhol exhibit draws students

POTSDAM — Most students will agree that an hour playing with balloons beats chemistry class.

At SUNY Potsdam's Gibson Gallery on Monday, about a dozen "Silver Clouds" floated behind a silver curtain. Inside, high school students from Norwood-Norfolk Central School, Norwood, gently tossed the 5-foot-long balloons back and forth or lay beneath them to watch as they drifted through the long, white room.

"I would love to have a room of balloons," said Amy L. Tiernan, 17. "This is completely new to me. We just came in here and we were like, 'What is happening?'"

The room of balloons is part of an Andy Warhol exhibition, which also includes more than 100 of Warhol's Polaroid pictures and several of his gelatin silver prints.

The Polaroids, mostly portraits, were studies for his screen prints, and many shots of the same person are on display. By coincidence, there are several Polaroid studies for one of the screen prints currently on loan to the gallery.

"A show like this doesn't come around too often in the north country," said Benjamin K. Yandeau, a Norwood-Norfolk art teacher who accompanied his students to the show. "We thought they needed to see it, and they probably wouldn't go if we asked them to go on their own."

The photos are joined by several of Mr. Warhol's screen prints, including a portrait of a bright red Mao Zedong, which belongs to the college and hung in art department Chairman Mark S. Huff's office for about two years.

"It was great having him in my office for parents and students to come and see, but the stare was a bit overwhelming," Mr. Huff said.

Films, including a biography and a selection of Mr. Warhol's screen tests, are on a constant rotation on the gallery's third level. The screen tests are a series of nearly 500 short black and white films of 189 different people, ranging from avant-garde dancers and artists to high school dropouts and drag queens.

Several students sprawled out on benches or red bean-bag chairs to watch snippets about the artist's life.

"It's very interesting," said Daniel M. Colbert, 17. "I think he expanded the horizon of artwork. He brought light into some places that people were scared to."

Mr. Warhol's "Clouds" were designed with the help of an engineer from New Jersey — one of the first open collaborations between a major 20th-century artist and a scientist, according to a gallery wall post.

"The original design was going to be a light-bulb shape but the technology wasn't there," said April K. Vasher-Dean, Gibson Gallery director. "It's a mixture of helium and air that lets them float. They're supposed to float around at eye level. It doesn't take much helium to make things float, I discovered."

Each student group is warned about ways to "avoid a cloudburst" — no punching or kicking the balloons, and no pillow fights. Since the exhibit opened at the beginning of the month, only one cloud has popped, Ms. Vasher-Dean said. Several school groups have come to view the exhibit and more are scheduled.

"It's a great equalizer — you can be too cool out there, but in here, they're all little kids," she said. "Being able to interact and touch the art is really different."

The exhibit runs until April 10.