Warhol: Not so well hidden in plain sight

works from the Permanent Collection

curated by Lucas Azevedo Cabral

Andy Warhol didn’t just make artwork about popular culture—he reframed it. His portraits of icons like Wayne Gretzky and Marilyn Monroe reframed fame as something manufactured, repeatable, and consumable. Through his choice of subject matter and treatment of their image, Warhol rendered celebrity not as something earned, but as something to be made and monetized.

Warhol lived at a time when queerness was often coded, denied, or closeted, and while he never publicly declared his sexuality, it was a well-known truth visible in his work. He didn’t need to say it. It was there in the way he moved through the world, in the people he surrounded himself with, and in the images he chose to make. In a time when being openly queer could be dangerous, he crafted a presence that was ambiguous, yet unmistakable.  Warhol used his own aloof, obscure celebrity persona not just as a shield, but as a strategy—allowing him to comment on and succeed in a world poised to reject him.

Warhol’s influence has only expanded, now foundational to the visual language of pop culture, consumerism, and celebrity. His influence is everywhere: in advertising, fashion, music videos, and branding—from Apple and Supreme to Comme des Garçons, Uniqlo, Gaga, Bowie, and Madonna. You’d be hard-pressed to walk through any mall and not find his imagery or style replicated en masse for fast fashion retailers. His work, like that of queer contemporaries Keith Haring and Tom of Finland, continues to shape and infiltrate popular culture—even when the image’s context and creator are unknown by those who wear it on their clothing.

This is the paradox and power of queer cultural visibility: to shape the mainstream while remaining coded, unrecognized, or misread. Warhol’s legacy is a testament to how queer aesthetics can live invisibly in plain sight—absorbed, replicated, and remade by the culture that once excluded or ridiculed them. It reveals the radical potential of the fringe not only to infiltrate dominant culture, but to rewrite it.