Film Your Own Warhol-Inspired Screen Test!

As part of our exhibition Warhol Women, we are presenting 20 of Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests—a series of short, silent, black-and-white films that translate the artist’s portraiture from canvas to celluloid. During the exhibition, we’re also giving visitors the opportunity to film their own, Warhol-inspired screen test in our very own homage to the enveloping silver environment of the original Factory where these films were made!

About the Screen Tests

Between 1963 and 1966, Warhol filmed over 450 individuals using his 16mm Bolex camera, and silent, black-and-white rolls of film. Each Screen Test took exactly three minutes to create, lasting as long as the 100-ft roll of film took to spool through the camera. Warhol gave his ‘actors’ no direction and often left the room during the filming, leaving the subject to reveal themselves slowly to the camera, with every blink or twitch captured in a “living portrait.”

Through the Screen Tests, Warhol created his own ‘Hollywood-style’ stable of ‘Superstars’—actors interesting enough to carry a film on their own, simply by being themselves. His subjects included both famous and anonymous visitors to his Silver Factory studio, including Warhol ‘Superstars’ Edie Sedgwick and Baby Jane Holzer, poet Allen Ginsberg, Dennis Hopper, Bob Dylan, Lou Reed and Nico, and artists Salvador Dalí and Marcel Duchamp.

Join us in our homage to the Factory, sit down in front of the lens, and let your inner self emerge on camera!

Film Your Own Screen Test Hours:

Wednesdays, 1–6PM

Saturdays, 10AM–6PM

“Beauties in photographs are different from beauties in person. It must be hard to be a model, because you’d want to be like the photograph of you, and you can’t ever look that way. And so you start to copy the photograph. Photographs usually bring in another half-dimension. (Movies bring in another whole dimension. That screen magnetism is something secret—if you could only figure out what it is and how to make it, you’d have a really good product to sell. But you can’t even tell if someone has it until you actually see them up there on the screen. You have to give screen tests to find out.)” —Andy Warhol