One Saturday in June, on the seventh floor of an office building beside the Andy Warhol Bridge, Maddi Love stood before a classroom of 17 aspiring entrepreneurs on laptops.
Love, who leads the marketing and sales team for Pittsburgh-based parking app Meter Feeder, guided them through a series of exercises to help them target customers. The class alternated between short lectures and assignments students worked on independently.
Love walked the room, stopping to counsel individual students like one with a vintage-clothing resale business.
The student had listed as potential clients both men and women.
That isn’t targeting, Love explained: “You’ve got to get rid of one or the other or you’ve got to get rid of both.” She added, “If you’re targeting women you have to say what type of women you’re targeting,” based on their personal style.
“Women that work from home,” said the student.
“Targeting hipsters is going to be a better option,” Love said.
Students in the class said it was valuable.
“It’s been great,” said Jay “Ruffbone” White, 41, a Beltzhoover resident with a video production business. He said he’s learned new software and website construction: “Learning just different ways to go about getting new clients.”
He said he had already applied his new project management skills, including writing out job descriptions. “Now I’ll be able to put things down a little bit better for my clients.”
Yet this free marketing class wasn’t run by a community college, say, or a local educational nonprofit. Rather, it was offered by The Andy Warhol Museum, as part of an ambitious initiative called The Pop District.
The District, which the museum launched in May 2022, is a $60 million, 10-year plan to remake the museum’s corner of the North Side with public art and a new performance venue. The initiative also includes workforce development programs.
The Warhol, one of the four Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh, ranks among Pittsburgh’s top cultural institutions. Museum leaders tout the District as a model for cultural nonprofits seeking to improve their communities. Executive director Patrick Moore says the initiative is also a way to create new revenue for an institution that’s been operating in the red.
However, critics — including a number of high-level staffers who all left the museum recently within a year of each other — say the Pop District played a large role in their departure. They say the District threatens the 30-year-old museum’s mission as a keeper of Andy Warhol’s artistic legacy and promoter of cutting-edge art.
“The museum has been taken over by the alien that is the Pop District,” said one current employee.
In either case, the way the Pop District plays out might well determine the museum’s fate.
“A really dramatic departure”
The Andy Warhol Museum opened in 1994, seven years after the death of its Pittsburgh-born namesake. Warhol’s spirit suffuses the North Side building, from its seventh-floor exhibit surveying his life story to its first-floor gift shop and café, and all those iconic silkscreens, silver balloons and experimental films in between. In 2022, it welcomed nearly 153,000 visitors.
Under the late Tom Sokolowski, named director in 1996, the museum became one of the city’s biggest tourist draws and developed a Warholian reputation for both brashness and openness. Summoning the memory of the 1960s scene at Warhol’s studio the Factory, the museum became a focal point for everything avant-garde and queer in the city, back when the culture had fewer public spaces for such expressions.
The Pop District takes that legacy as a jumping-off point. Named for Warhol’s indelible association with Pop Art, it embraces a four-block area. The Warhol said that the District will eventually create “over $100 million in annual economic activity,” spark $1 million in annual income for “creative talent,” and bring 50,000 or more new visitors to the North Shore each year. There is also a plan to site more public art in the immediate neighborhood.
Components include The Warhol Academy. The Academy encompasses both a Creative Entrepreneur Lab, to teach business skills to adults, and The Warhol Creative, in which young people are paid to learn digital content creation skills and produce materials for clients including the museum itself, Dell Computers and Howmet Aerospace. All the programs prioritize serving people underrepresented in the creative and technical industries, including people of color, LGBTQ+ folks, and women.
For now, the Pop District’s footprint is limited. Pop District logos adorn the storefront windows on a parking garage across the street from the museum. But the Warhol currently activates those spaces only intermittently, with events like youth screen printing workshops. Long-term, the District’s most prominent element might well be the planned $45 million events-and-concert venue, to occupy what’s now a surface parking lot.
Planning for the Pop District began in 2020, about three years after Patrick Moore was hired as executive director. (He replaced Eric Shiner, Sokolowski’s successor.)
Internal dissatisfaction at the museum seemed to crest starting in late 2021. That December, director of exhibitions Keny Marshall quit. He was followed by four other director-level staffers, including director of learning and public engagement Danielle Linzer (January 2022); senior director of external affairs Karen Lautanen (March 2022); chief curator José Carlos Diaz (June 2022), and chief curator Jessica Beck (October 2022).
The Warhol has fewer than 40 full-time employees, and the exodus represented most of its highest-ranking staff. In the weeks before Beck’s departure, one museum employee described the feeling there as one of “constant malaise,” with “directors jumping ship.”
All five directors were long-serving, and all resigned in the months just before or just after the museum launched the Pop District.
WESA interviewed several of the five directors who departed, along with other former Warhol staffers. All spoke on condition of anonymity, for fear of retaliation in the relatively small world of arts nonprofits and the foundations who fund them.
Many ex-staffers criticized Moore’s leadership style, alleging poor communication and a lack of transparency. And they said the District only furthered a move away from what they consider the museum’s core mission of preserving, studying and sharing Warhol’s art.
For one, after Moore took over, in 2017, the Warhol began mounting fewer shows: just two a year rather than the three it had produced annually for many years. Some felt the quality declined as well.
“The amount of output that we would do that focused on doing original research into Warhol and kind of showing new connections, I think if you were savvy enough you could see that take a nosedive,” said one former staffer.
Some ex-staffers cited “Andy Warhol: Revelation,” a 2019 exhibit curated by Diaz exploring Warhol’s faith, as one that fell short of museum standards for insight and scholarly rigor.
By contrast, fans of the museum might hark to well-regarded shows like “Andy Warhol / Ai Weiwei,” a 2016 exhibit juxtaposing Warhol and the contemporary Chinese artist.
Contentions that exhibit quality declined under Moore were symbolized by the fact that, following Beck’s departure, in October 2022, the museum employed no official curator for nearly eight months. Moore himself lacks a curatorial background; he first joined the museum in 2011, as director of development, and later served as deputy director and managing director.
In an interview conducted this past April, in his office at the museum, Moore said staging fewer shows is strategic.
“I think there were too many exhibitions here,” he said. “We intend to continue with [two exhibits per year], and that’s the level of programming that I actually think is right for a museum of this size.”
Moore said not having a curator for eight months after Beck’s departure didn’t hurt the museum, either. “Not at all, because the exhibitions haven’t ceased,” he said. And he defended the shows’ quality, noting that “Revelation” toured to two other museums.
Moore himself curated the museum’s current exhibit, “Unseen: Permanent Works from The Collection.” He touted it as a chance to view overlooked treasures the museum owns but has never shown. But one former staffer called the exhibit simply “work that other curators deemed not as interesting.”
In May, the Warhol hired as its new chief curator Aaron Levi Garvey, who previously held curatorial roles at the Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art, at Auburn University, and New York’s The Hudson Eye/Jonah Bokaer Arts Foundation.
Planning for the Pop District itself also seems to have alienated some staffers, who felt they were left out of the loop. When a consultant was hired to work on the project, said one former director, “They were surprised that staff didn’t really know about it because it hadn’t been discussed internally.”
Moreover, said another former director, the Pop District “was a really dramatic departure in terms of the mission.” Among Moore and other top managers, like deputy director Rachel Baron-Horn, added this ex-staffer, “It felt like there was a lack of care and investment in the day-to-day operations of the museum,” like preserving the collection and providing a high-quality visitor experience. “I think that became a kind of secondary concern.”
Moore disputes that higher-level staffers were kept in the dark. “The entire senior staff of the museum has been involved with the Pop District from day one,” he said.
He also disagreed that the museum is neglecting its core mission. “The traditional mission of the museum is to provide opportunities for our community,” he said. “So I think it’s going to be hard to find anybody who says the opportunity to have paid work for young people is not a part of the mission of The Andy Warhol Museum. Because it absolutely is.”
While the Warhol is governed by the Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh board of directors, it has its own advisory board that meets to discuss museum business and make recommendations to the Carnegie’s board. One advisory board member, artist, philanthropist and film producer Henry Simonds, considers the Pop District “an expansion of our capacity to honor Warhol’s legacy,” he said. “I think it can only enhance our ability to grow audiences.”
“A profound impact on the region”
Initial philanthropic support for the District included a three-and-a-half-year, $15 million grant from Richard King Mellon, and a four-year, $10 million grant from the Hillman Foundation. At the May 2022 event announcing the Pop District, speakers at the Warhol included Hillman Foundation president David K. Roger, who said the project suggested “the future of how museums are going to engage with communities in a very, very different way going forward.”
“This is an honest initiative telling kids what they need to do to be able to compete in the 21st-century economy,” said R.K. Mellon Foundation director Sam Reiman.
In March 2023, the Warhol unveiled the new Pop District headquarters, on the freshly renovated seventh floor of a neighboring office building. Attendees at the invitation-only affair included County Executive Rich Fitzgerald, city councilor Bobby Wilson, and several state legislators.
Perhaps 100 gathered in the big central lounge, wandered the conference rooms, and perused the in-house video studio. Standing beneath the chic exposed ductwork, Jeremy Leventhal, a co-founder of real estate investment company Faros Properties who’s on the Warhol’s advisory board, said, “This initiative will create a profound impact on the region and beyond.”
“This is a place where our young people are acquiring life-changing skills,” said Carnegie Museums CEO and president Steven Knapp.
The Pop District’s classes and workshops are outside the traditional function of an art museum, especially their focus on workforce development.
The Warhol Academy’s 20-week documentary filmmaking and social media fellowships operate as after-school programs four days a week in which students are paid $18 an hour to learn and to produce content.
In all, the Warhol Academy has enrolled 94 participants to date, said a museum spokesperson.
Zyannah Zigler began her Warhol Academy fellowship in 2022, as a senior at the Pittsburgh High School for the Creative and Performing Arts. Fellows learned camera skills and video editing, and made TikToks and Instagram posts for the museum and for clients including Dell.
“It’s like a job,” she told WESA this past March.
In one recent Instagram video, Moore, as part of a series called “Patrick’s Polaroids,” shows off a photo from the museum’s book of celebrity visitors, marking a 1999 visit by Robert Downey, Jr. Another TikTok is a montage of visitors set to electronic dance music promoting the museum’s “Final Friday” event in September.
Zigler completed the fellowship in September, as a Carlow University freshman studying media and animation.
“I think it was a really great experience,” Zigler said in October. “I have a lot of professional experience people my age might not be able to get.”
The Pop District now has three full-time and five part-time permanent employees, led by Dan Law, the museum’s associate director. (In August, the museum fired Anneliese Martinez, the Pop District’s senior director. The Warhol said her position was eliminated as part of a “reorganization.” Martinez declined to comment for this story.)
The District has progressed on other fronts, too.
In June, Citizens Financial Group committed $350,000 to the Pop District, both toward the Warhol Academy and to support the District’s biggest public art project to date, a mural by acclaimed Pittsburgh-based artist Mikael Owunna, installed on the side of a building across from the museum.
Then there’s the concert venue, known for now as the Pop District Entertainment Venue. The four-story building, clad in white, would fill the nearby “Brillo Box” parking lot with a 1,000-capacity concert hall to host touring bands and other acts. A 360-capacity event space would accommodate weddings, corporate gatherings and more for which the museum says there has long been far more demand than it can meet inside its current home.
The design, by Desmone Architects, received final approval from the city’s Planning Commission in October. Construction could begin as soon as next year, museum officials say.
“We think it is achievable”
Some former Warhol Museum staffers questioned whether the Pop District can achieve its lofty goals — in particular, in terms of job creation and new revenue.
“Those outcomes and the achievability of those outcomes, and what’s being done in the institution to try to achieve those outcomes, is directly responsible for why so many of us left,” said one former director.
Moore says the museum can reach those goals — and, in fact, that it must. A big reason is that the Warhol is systemically underfunded. Its endowment — the pot of money nonprofits rely on for investment income and to stabilize their finances over time — is far too small. Moore said in April the Warhol’s endowment is “around $20 million,” but that “it should be closer to $50 million for a museum of this size and this reputation.”
The total endowment for the Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh is $424.5 million, with the vast majority dedicated to the Carnegie museums of art and natural history, said a spokesperson, who declined to break down the allotment by museum. The Warhol’s endowment is limited to funds donors have designated for it, and the Warhol — like the Carnegie Science Center — was founded nearly a century later than its sister museums.
That means the Warhol must work harder to make budget. “We have to start more or less from zero every year and raise the money every year,” said Moore.
In 2022, the Warhol had $9.1 million in expenses against $6.7 in revenue, for a deficit of about $2.4 million.
The museum’s current budget is $9.7 million (not counting about $3 million that benefits the Warhol but is absorbed in the Carnegie Museums’ shared services budget, Moore said).
For 2022, the most recent year for which a detailed breakdown is available, major sources of revenue included ticket sales, gift shop receipts and revenue from traveling exhibitions. Less than 40 percent was from gifts and grants.
But those touring exhibitions present a looming challenge. In 2022, according to the museum, they brought in about $850,000, or 13% of total revenue. Packages of Warhol works have traveled around the globe, from Brooklyn and Kentucky to Tokyo and Saudi Arabia. But like all physical objects, artworks suffer wear and damage in transit and on display.
“That’s why every year there’s a greater and greater number of objects that can’t be toured anymore,” Moore said. “Especially the very early work, and the iconic work, because it’s very fragile.”
So the museum anticipates a drop in this steady source of revenue.
Enter the Pop District Entertainment Venue. “The general goal would be to replace income from the touring program,” said Moore.
Warhol Museum associate director Dan Law, whose focus is the Pop District, has stated that one source of bookings for the venue would be touring musical acts that now bypass Pittsburgh.
Another piece of the revenue puzzle is the Warhol Academy. At the moment, the Pop District’s training programs rely heavily on philanthropy. Moore says the plan is to make the initiatives self-sustaining with revenue from clients of the museum’s in-house creative agency.
“That work as a content creation boutique agency basically, would over time hopefully scale so the Pop District could be sustained by that, the workforce elements of it,” he said. “But at the moment, we’re fortunate that we not only have it free for these young people, but they’re getting paid 18 dollars an hour to do the work.”
It’s unclear how satisfied Creative Agency client-sponsors like Dell and Howmet are with the marketing materials the Warhol is producing for them. Neither Dell nor Howmet returned messages seeking comment.
Moore said the plan is for any revenue from Pop District initiatives to complement the larger capital campaign the Carnegie Museums are planning. “It’s not a stand-alone effort,” he said.
Then there’s the community development component. Can the Pop District really create $100 million in new economic activity for the neighborhood?
“Absolutely,” said Moore. He notes that $100 million annually is the goal after 10 years (so by 2032). “That is still the goal and we still think it is achievable,” he said in April.
Likewise, he said, the goal of bringing 50,000 or more new visitors to the neighborhood each year. (Drawing 1,000 visitors each week to the 1,000-capacity concert venue alone would make that number.)
In any case, the Pop District represents a new business model for the Warhol.
“I’ve always believed if you’re going to raise new money you have to do new things,” Moore said.
A “positive trend”
It’s not unusual for art museums to sponsor public art, and many operate dedicated performance spaces. Think of the Carnegie Museums’ own Music Hall and Lecture Hall, which often host non-museum talks and concerts.
What’s most novel about the Pop District is the Warhol Academy and the workforce training initiatives, as well as promises of broader community development.
Asked to comment on such efforts, a spokesperson for the American Alliance of Museums emailed this statement: “Museums are seeking ways that they can be more deeply embedded in their communities. Many are asking critical questions about how they can best meet the needs of their community members, what programs can be taken outside of the museums’ walls, and how to ensure their relevancy in a time of constant change. We’ve seen many examples of this in recent years and it’s a positive trend that we’re confident we’ll continue to see.”
Asked for examples, an AAM spokesperson noted NEW INC, a project of New York’s New Museum of Contemporary Art. The initiative, founded in 2014, was “the first museum-led cultural incubator dedicated to supporting innovation, collaboration, and entrepreneurship across art, design, and technology,” according to the museum’s website. “It occupies eight thousand square feet of dedicated office, workshop, social, and presentation space, and each year attracts an outstanding interdisciplinary community of one hundred members who are investigating new ideas and developing sustainable practices.”
Still, the Pop District might be unique, and some experts consider it a viable pursuit for the Warhol.
“I’m really excited about the Warhol’s Pop District,” said Hayley Haldeman, who teaches graduate courses on museum operations at Carnegie Mellon University’s Heinz College.
“Museums are really thinking broadly about what their mission is,” said Haldeman, an attorney with Cohen & Grigsby and former executive director of Pittsburgh’s Mattress Factory Museum. Of the Warhol, she added, “The fact that they’re thinking about it more than just in terms of what the pre-pandemic tools were in the toolbox is really smart.”
Brett Crawford, a professor of arts management at CMU’s Heinz College, agreed.
“Increasingly, museums want not to be seen as a preservation space but as a community collaborator and partner,” Crawford said.
Crawford said she was unaware of another museum with an income-generating creative agency. But she called the Warhol Academy program “exciting” and admired the focus on keeping creatives in Pittsburgh. “I think this is a great way to contribute to that,” she said. She added, “You’ve got to try something new.”
“Not what it was”
Few employees at the Warhol today worked there during Tom Sokolowski’s tenure as executive director, which ended in 2010. But former employees who left after Patrick Moore took over tend to remember it favorably.
“Tom Sokolowski welcomed argument, really liked intellectual curiosity, kind of hired people who were very much scholars and interested in pushing the scholarship of the museum. Eric [Shiner] followed in that vein but was very much about the image of the museum,” said one ex-staffer. When Moore arrived, “it really became instead of a focus on like intellectually curious exhibitions, it was all about fundraising, it was all about shoring up the endowment — which needed to be done, but it was a much heavier business model."
“In that model, though, they hired people who cared less about the art, who cared less about the ideas.”
Plenty at the Warhol has not changed. The museum still exhibits art and screens films. It still runs arts education programming for youths, and still stages the annual LGBTQ+ Youth Prom. It even operates a summertime School of Drag for teens — a newer development that complements its traditional cutting-edge stance.
These days, too, the Warhol’s branding campaigns include one with the theme “Join the Family,” whose billboards and social media postings have celebrated local fashion designers, artists, performers and poets. The colorful ads play off Warhol’s own image as a rule-breaker and someone open to new ideas and unusual people.
If not everyone at the Warhol has felt as positively about its new, Pop District-focused direction, it’s worth emphasizing that all five director-level staffers who left in 2021 and 2022 were hired under Moore’s predecessor, Shiner. Was this change in museum culture one that, whatever its overall merits, simply alienated many who worked at the museum?
As one of the five former directors said of the Warhol: “It’s just not what it was at all.”
And in large part, that seems to be how the museum’s leadership wants it.
