Mead was born in Michigan to a well-to-do family in Grosse Pointe, where his father was chairman of the state’s Democratic Party and his mother was a beautiful socialite. His parents divorced when Taylor was very young and he was sent to live with grandparents in Ohio. To escape, he stowed-away on a bus and rode for miles before being discovered and returned to his family. He loved Hollywood films and movie stars, especially Buster Keaton, Charles Chaplin, Greta Garbo, Bette Davis, and Irene Dunne, whom he thought resembled his mother.

After attending the Loomis School in Connecticut for a short time, he joined the Pasadena Playhouse in California, where he studied the work of George Bernard Shaw, then left to volunteer for World War 2. He said that he was declared unfit for the military because of his drooping eye, which would later become a hallmark of his numerous performances on the stage and screen.

In New York he briefly studied acting with Herbert Berghof, one of the co-founders of the Actor’s Studio.

Returning to Detroit, he tried Wayne State University for a short time and art school for “a day.” He worked for several months as a stockbroker-in-training, a job his father had secured for him, and was off again. In the unacknowledged mode of the beatnik, he hitchhiked around the country for more than a decade. Inspired by his experiences as a young gay man on the road, he began jotting short poems and one-liners. In the course of his travels, he was arrested about 12 times, “just on general principles.” His ensuing jail time “contributed to [his] feeling of being an outsider.”

In San Francisco in the late-1950s, he discovered the coffeehouse scene of the Beat poets, and began to publicly read his work at the Co-Existence Bagel Shop. Filmmaker Ron Rice met Taylor at one of his readings and, inspired by Robert Frank’s and Alfred Leslie’s recent film Pull My Daisy (1959)starring Allen Ginsberg and narrated by Jack Kerouac, made The Flower Thief.  The film was enthusiastically received by audiences and the press. Mead, whose performance as the childlike picaresque hero wandering around North Beach with his teddy bear earned him almost mainstream recognition, became the first underground movie star.

Soon after, he played a multitude of characters in films by Vernon Zimmerman: Lemon Hearts (1960)and To L.A…with Lust (1961). In 1962 Zimmerman received the Rosenthal Award for young directors for Lemon Hearts.

Later in 1961, Mead worked on two films with Bob Chatterton in Los Angeles, before moving to New York City, where he was re-united with Rice to star with Jack Smith in The Queen of Sheba Meets the Atom Man (1963). The first volume of his one-liners and poems written during his cross-country travels, The Anonymous Diary of A New York Youth, was published in 1961.

In New York, he found more audiences for his confrontational poetry readings at cafés such as the Gaslight, the Fat Black Pussy Cat, and the Epitome.“We would read our wildest stuff and try to drive out the customers,” said Mead. Henry Geldzahler, a curator at the Metropolitan Museum, was familiar with Taylor’s work and offered to introduce him to his friend Warhol.

In the fall of 1963, Taylor Mead drove from New York to California with Warhol, Gerard Malanga, and Wynn Chamberlain to attend the opening of Warhol’s second Pop exhibition at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles, a show of his Elvis and Liz paintings.  While there, he played the title character in Andy Warhol’s unusual early send-up of Hollywood films, Tarzan and Jane Regained …Sort Of, cavorting around Southern California with Naomi Levine (as Jane) and Dennis Hopper (as Mead’s stunt double). Mead also edited the footage and the soundtrack.

Another reason for the four to drive to California was the occasion of the opening of the Marcel Duchamp retrospective exhibition at the Pasadena Art Museum, which opened right after Warhol’s show.

In the summer of 1964, at the height of the underground film movement in New York, a conventional filmmaker wrote a letter of complaint to the Village Voice about its championing of “films shot without cameras, films shot without lenses, films shot without film, films shot out of focus, films focusing on Taylor Mead’s ass for two hours.”  Mead replied, “Andy Warhol and I have searched the archives of the Warhol colossus and find no ‘two hour film of Taylor Mead’s ass.’” He also stated that they would “rectify” the situation immediately, and the film was shot in Warhol’s Factory that very month (although its length is actually 90 minutes).

A double bill of plays by Frank O’Hara and LeRoi Jones (later Amiri Baraka) starring Taylor Mead ran briefly in March 1964 at the Writers’ Stage in the Lower East Side. In Leroi Jones’s play, The Baptism, Mead played a gay character who denounces the hypocrisy of the church. The performances were a huge success, but Jones declined to transfer his work to a more-established venue. O’Hara’s The General Returns from One Place to Another featured Mead as a campy General Douglas MacArthur, arriving in Manila and ordering every inch of the palace marble to be “shining like snow in the Arctic.” Despite the short run (only four performances), Mead won an Obie award for his work in The General Returns.

After the sudden death of Ron Rice in December 1964 and the disappointment of The Baptism, Mead decided to try his luck in Europe. He stayed for three years, moving between Rome, Paris, Greece, Istanbul, Stockholm, and Amsterdam. He traveled light: a knapsack, air mattress, and a movie camera. A lack of funds forced him to shoot his European travel film, called Home Movies, one frame at a time.

While in Europe, he made several films with Jean-Jacques Lebel. Before these could be shown at his Third Festival of Free Expression in Paris in May 1966, at the Theatre de la Chimere, they were censored and destroyed by the film lab because they contained nudity. The following year, Mead attended a screening of Warhol’s newest film, the double-screen epic Chelsea Girls. Mead’s reaction to the film was “I’ve been in La Dolce Vita land too long. Chelsea Girls is the real thing. I’m coming home.”

Upon his return to America, Warhol cast Mead in four films in fairly quick succession: Imitation of Christ (1967), Nude Restaurant (1967), Lonesome Cowboys (1967), and San Diego Surf (1968). Another volume of Mead’s poetry was published at this time, On Amphetamine and In Europe (1968).

In the middle of all of this activity, one terrifying day Mead saved Warhol’s life. An unknown man entered the Factory with a gun and demanded $500 which he claimed was owed to him, and then played a nervous Russian roulette with Paul Morrissey, Patrick Tilden-Close, Billy Name, and about five other Factory superstars. He actually fired one shot, but it was aimed at the ceiling. As the intruder began to focus his attention on Warhol, Mead jumped on his back, and then ran to the window and screamed for help. The now off-balance gunman immediately left the building, and drove off in a waiting car. The police refused to believe the incident wasn’t a publicity stunt.

Also at that time, Mead appeared in the play Conquest of the Universe, directed by John Vaccaro at the Playhouse of the Ridiculous.  Surrounded by other stars of the underground including Mary Woronov and Beverly Grant, he was described by Stephen Brecht as “magnificent, the best thing in the show, as good a technician now, or almost, as [Zero] Mostel or [Bert] Lahr.”

Mead estimated that he appeared in 130 films in all, including Robert Downey Sr.’s Babo 73, Adolphas Mekas’s Hallelujah the Hills, John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy, Brand X by Wynn Chamberlain, One Plus One by Jean-Luc Godard, Cleopatra by Michel Auder, and Buster’s Bedroom by Rebecca Horn, and Coffee and Cigarettes by Jim Jarmusch. He was featured in the role of a priest in Penny Arcade’s live performance Bitch! Dyke! Faghag! Whore!. He also appeared on television programs such as The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson and Saturday Night Live, and exhibited his paintings in New York.

In 1986, Hanuman Books’ series of miniatures published “Son of Andy Warhol,” a volume of Mead’s writing.

In the late-1990s, he hosted a weekly live program on the Internet, The Convertible Taylor Mead, and completed the huge manuscript for his autobiography, also titled Son of Andy Warhol, which remains unpublished. Another book, A Simple Country Girl, was published in 2005.  

The Warhol Museum feted Mead with a festival of ten of his films throughout November and December 1999, including a screening of Taylor Mead’s Ass, which had recently been restored; Taylor introduced the film and answered audience questions afterwards.

Taylor Mead steadily continued to give poetry readings, primarily at the Bowery Poetry Club. His last public appearance with a Warhol film was his introduction for the New York premiere screening of San Diego Surf, which features one of his most brilliant performances, in October 2012. In a brief interview published in advance of the screening, he reminisced about the filming with a statement that describes his life and creativity, “I could improvise forever.”

The Museum thanks Steven Watson and Penny Arcade for their generosity in assisting with this text, which is adapted from that which accompanied a small exhibition at the Andy Warhol Museum in 1999, curated by Matt Wrbican.

Image Credits (top to bottom of page):

Andy Warhol
Lonesome Cowboys, 1967-68
16mm film, color, sound, 109 minutes
Taylor Mead with Joe Dallesandro and Eric Emerson
©2013 The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved.

Andy Warhol
Lonesome Cowboys, 1967-68
16mm film, color, sound, 109 minutes
Taylor Mead with Viva
©2013 The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved.

Andy Warhol
Tarzan and Jane Regained, Sort Of…, 1963
16mm film, black and white & color, sound, 80 minutes
Taylor Mead as Tarzan with Dennis Hopper
©2013 The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved.

Andy Warhol
Taylor Mead’s Ass, 1964
16mm film, black and white, silent, 90 minutes at 16frame per second
With Taylor Mead
©2013 The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved. 

Julia Warhola was an artist herself (visitors to the 15 Minutes Eternal exhibition in Asia will have the opportunity to see some of Julia’s drawings).  She and Warhol were quite close, and Warhol used her handwriting in many early prints.    "When you are in the Caribbean this Winter..." (Fish Under Glass) is a wonderful example from 1959 of Warhol’s use of Julia’s lettering with his art. 

Some of Warhol’s work for Charm will be exhibited in “Reading Andy Warhol,” which opens in Munich in September 2013 and hits The Andy Warhol Museum in 2015. Visitors to the “15 Minutes Eternal” exhibition in Asia will see an issue of Charm from TC51. For more about Andy’s early career, check out the Warhol website.

What was inside TC526?  A little of everything!  The contents were incredibly varied (which isn’t surprising for a TC).  In this live footage from the opening, Marie and I talk about some of the exciting findings.  Not included in this footage: seven aluminum dental molds, packets of aluminum and plaster teeth, a 14 page typewritten inventory of artworks and furniture in Warhol’s studio, a tin Roy Rogers alarm clock, numerous Interview transcripts between Warhol and Truman Capote, and a vast array of ephemeral items.  The contents of TC526 span 1978-1982, and highlight some of Warhol’s business and personal activities during those years.   

We were so excited to emerge from our locked Archives to share the contents of TC526.  If you’re intrigued by what we found in TC526, we’re happy to announce that on January 11^th, we’re going to open another Time Capsule for the public!

When I talk about the TCs, people always ask about my favorite items. There is the obvious cool stuff, the big finds, like the three Warhol portraits of Bella Abzug from the series done for the October 6, 1977, cover of Rolling Stone (RS 249) that I found in TC238. Then there are the items that are memorable for their unexpectedness and fun, like an “Amigos de Julio” Julio Iglesias fan club muscle t-shirt, or Warhol's State of Colorado livestock brand registration card. (His brand was A / Lazy W.)

I love finding zines and records, and the TCs are full of them, like an early issue (1985) of Jeff Smith's Seattle-based Feminist Baseball and lots of issues of Velvet Underground fanzine What Goes On; a white label of The Smiths self-titled (Rough 61, 1984) and Moe Tucker's 7” “Around And Around / Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” (Trash T82644-1, 1981).  The TCs are also full of ephemera related to the 1980s New York music and club scenes: Invitations to a performance by Johnny Dynell (Limelight, 1986), and to a party hosted by Joey Arias & Edwidge (Danceteria, 1985). There are also fliers for first American appearances by bands like Les Rita Mitsouko (Palladium, 1986), Xmal Deutschland (Danceteria, 1984), and Sisters of Mercy (Danceteria, 1983).

I appreciate all of these items in the Time Capsules because they help recreate the saturated, creative atmosphere inhabited by one of the most famous artists in the world. But I think my favorite things are the ones that tell us what meant the most to Warhol, personally: The postcards from him in New York to his mom back in Pittsburgh during the 1950s—they're signed “love, me.” The cards from his nephews and his goddaughter. The letters from the American Cancer Society thanking Warhol for donating artwork or money. The photographs of him at his friend Joan Quinn’s house, relaxed and laughing. And the Thanksgiving menu for the church where he was a soup kitchen volunteer on holidays. These items were the most unexpected, to me, and some of the coolest.

Newspapers are generally printed on lower-quality paper that contains wood pulp, which causes the paper to be naturally acidic.  Wood pulp is born acidic, and this acidic nature causes the newsprint to become brittle over time.  To this end, we take several preservation measures to protect these valuable serials and their intellectual content.  We take special care to build acid-free folders of appropriate sizes in which to house the newspapers.  Remembering always that our materials must return to their Time Capsule, these folders will add additional support when they are stacked inside the box.  As our newspapers are always at risk for becoming increasingly more brittle, each newspaper is interleaved with acid free paper in an attempt to improve the stability of the papers.  To absorb additional acids, several sheets of MicroChamber paper are tucked within folders and the box itself.

To number, catalogue and preserve TC433, which contains 11 Daily News, 37 New York Posts, 1 Village Voice and 14 New York Post covers, 10 16 x 20 inch folders, 104 sheets of acid-free legal paper, 3 pairs of blue Nitrile gloves and 5 sheets of MicroChamber paper were used.  The headlines chronicle events both significant and trivial—TC433 contains headlines spanning the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, the hijacking of EgyptAir Flight 648, the death of Rock Hudson and the happy return of a beloved West Highland terrior named Mandy to her family.  We may never know exactly why Warhol stashed so many serials within TCs, but we can at least know they’re appropriately cared for.

Sometimes it takes a little digging to uncover all the treasures contained in a Time Capsule. For Trunk 1 it took three weeks, eight employees and over 80 archival folders to process the contents. Before we return the trunk to storage, we would like to show you our favorite finds and give you a glimpse into some of the work we do preserving such a vast array of materials.

Not all of Andy’s Time Capsules are contained in cardboard packing boxes.  A few are in the form of filing cabinets, and one — Trunk 1 — is a steamer trunk so heavy it took two art handlers to move.

In this video, the TC Cataloguers open Trunk 1 and discuss some of the contents. Trunk 1 was full of surprises, and we’re excited to share some of them with you!

Archeologists have a saying—and this could just be to reassure one another that their grant money wasn’t a colossal waste—that it’s not what you find, it’s what you find out.  Sure, you spent three hours this afternoon digging meticulously to bedrock and all you found was three bags worth of roughly broken pottery (no golden frogs, no jewelry, no worked shell!), but what does this tell you?  What does this mean about the people who lived in this location?  What doesn’t this mean for the people who lived there?  Does this support your research query, or could this bring up an entirely unexplored thought?

Time Capsule 350 contained a multitude of invitations and exhibition announcements for events occurring in November of 1983 at the Limelight in New York, and it took me the better part of a week and a visit to Wikipedia to realize that this was when the Limelight actually opened.  Included in TC 350 was also a press kit from the firm of Ari Bahat, the architect responsible for the redesign of the Episcopal Church of the Holy Union, the church housing the Limelight.  None of these invitations or supplemental material was exactly as staggering as finding a letter from Truman Capote, but what did the opening of the Limelight mean for New York’s nightlife?  The Limelight’s undeniably interesting future—as a home for club drug use, scandal, and now, of all things, a market!—could only, in November of 1983, be guessed at.  The announcements and invitations within TC 350 gave me scarcely a glimpse of what was ahead for the Limelight, but given the fanfare for the opening alone, I couldn’t help but infer that the Limelight would grow to be something remarkable. 

The peripheral material (the direct mail, the infinite issues of the New York Post, the Christie’s catalogues, even the most inexplicable of ephemera) within a Time Capsule has the potential to be as captivating as the most remarkable of finds.  It’s what you find out when you read between the lines.  It’s what you find out when you look beyond. 

Recycling plan
My plan is that this blog will provide a way of sharing some recent answers to basic information queries received through our web site, on the assumption that if it’s interesting to one person, then others might be curious, too. My first post has to do with a popular and still mostly affordable collecting niche.

Golden Madrigal
Over the past few years, prices have soared for old phonograph records for which Warhol designed the packaging or simply provided illustrations, most recently for Volumes 1 and 2 of the “Madrigal’s Magic Key to Spanish” series of language instruction publications. Consequently I’ve fielded many questions from people hoping to strike a little vinyl gold. Sometimes they do, but most often they do not.

Buy the book
The current published authority on this subject is “Andy Warhol / The Record Covers 1949-1987 / Catalogue Raisonné” (Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, and Prestel, 2008). It’s very useful in helping budding collectors to identify both Warhol’s various styles of illustration and many of the recordings in which he had a hand in one form or another (the book’s criteria for what constitutes a work by Warhol was very broad). Each image of the 50 covers in the Cat Rais is printed very large, about the same size as a 12-inch LP. The author Paul Marechal admits that more recordings will probably be discovered, and that’s already been proven to be true.

Don’t forget the other book
The Cat Rais of record covers was sold together with the catalogue to the exhibition Warhol Live: Music and Dance in Warhol’s Work. It includes excellent essays by professors Branden Joseph (on the Druds, a band that Warhol and many other pop artists formed in about 1963), John Hunisak (on Warhol’s love for opera), Roger Copeland (on dance), and Melissa Ragona (on Warhol’s audiotapes), and by the three co-curators (Stéphane Aquin of Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Emma Lavigne of Centre Pompidou, and myself).

Help wanted
Soon after these catalogues were published, I was contacted by two collectors asking about items in their collections that were not included in the book. When I saw images of the objects, it was clear that they were Warhol’s work: his stylistic “fingerprints” were all over them.

Gershwin: Rhapsody in Blue / Grofe: Grand Canyon Suite, 1950s
RCA Victor / Bluebird Classics Records; Hugo Winterhalter and his Orchestra, Byron Janis, pianist; cover illustration attributed to Andy Warhol
George Gershwin (composer), Ferde Grofé (composer), Andy Warhol (cover artist)
offset lithograph on coated record cover stock with vinyl record
12 1/8 x 12 1/4 in. (30.8 x 31.1 cm.)
The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Gift of Guy Minnebach
2008.1.3a-b
Courtesy of Sony Music Entertainment

Byron on Bluebird
These include a 12-inch LP recording by Hugo Winterhalter and his Orchestra, with Byron Janis, the Pittsburgh-native pianist (a pupil of Vladimir Horowitz) performing Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue and Ferde Grofé’s Grand Canyon Suite, released by RCA Bluebird Records (LBC-1045) in the 1950s. In the illustration reproduced on this recording’s packaging, Warhol’s blotted-line technique is clearly seen in the drawing of a grand piano, with the pianist and orchestra.

Det brinner en eld / Mörka ögon 1984
"A fire is burning / Dark eyes"
RATFAB (musical group), Andy Warhol (cover artist)
offset lithograph on coated paper sleeve, vinyl record, plastic 7 x 7 in. (17.8 x 17.8 cm.)
The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Gift of Richard Forrest
2009.2a-c
© 1984 Red House Records, Sweden
For further information on Ratfab please visit: www.ratfab.com  

Roland’s Albatross
Another is a privately published 7-inch recording by a Swedish band called RATFAB, in 1984. Warhol did this illustration as a favor to a friend whose grandson was in the band (lucky for them!). The songs on this recording are Det brinner en eld and Mörka ögon ("A fire is burning / Dark eyes"). Warhol’s work consists of the band’s name in his handwriting, repeated vertically three times in primary colors on a black ground. It was released in a small edition; probably fewer than 300 copies were made. If you’re wondering, RATFAB is an acronym for “Roland And The Flying Albatross Band.” Obviously, RATFAB is so much better!

Guy et Richard
I was very pleased to be able to identify Warhol’s work on these recordings, and also to receive copies of them as gifts to the museum from the collectors Guy Minnebach (of Belgium) and Richard Forrest (of Sweden). Guy also donated copies of two additional Warhol-illustrated record jackets which are included in the Catalogue Raisonné: a 7-inch recording of Waltzes by Johann Strauss, Jr. on Camden Records from the 1950s, and the 12-inch LP Four Divertimenti by Mozart, performed by the Wind Instrument Ensemble of the Vienna Symphony Orchestra and released as Epic's LC 3081 in 1956. Richard also supplied excellent backstory information on the RATFAB record for our collection database. My thanks to both of them!

Warhol Live
Because of their generosity, we were able to add these pieces to our presentation of Warhol Live in the summer of 2009). If you’re in Nashville this summer of 2011, look for this exhibition at the Frist Center for Visual Arts, in the heart of Music City.

Feel free to use the comment tool below to ask questions and leave comments!

Feel free to use the comment system on this page to ask questions and get the conversation started!

The tins of Altoids, which continually pop up in the Time Capsules, seem to suggest either a love for peppermint candies or a fear of halitosis. But it was a quote by Richard DuPont in New York Magazine that provided a glimpse into the way Warhol perceived the tin’s functionality:  “ [Andy] always had an Altoids tin full of Quaaludes that people had given him hoping to hang out with him, so he would give them to us too.” In the 1970’s, the use of Quaaludes as a recreational drug was widespread and Warhol’s crowd was no exception. According to Warhol in The Andy Warhol Diaries, “Everybody hands me Quaaludes and I always accept them now because they’re so expensive and I can sell them.”  

Maybe the Altoids tin was never more than an Altoids tin, but once the suggestion of something more nefarious is made, it’s hard to see these tins as containers of anything else. Like a riddle, once the secret has been revealed, it’s nearly impossible to view it for the first time again. Seeing how Warhol interpreted the objects in the Time Capsules not only gives us insight into the collection as a whole but also offers a glimpse into the mind of the man behind them. And isn’t that what separated Warhol from the rest of us? Reimagining what we all take for granted.

 Candy box (“Altoids”)
from “Time Capsule 318”
Manufactured by Smith Kendon Ltd., U.K.
ca.1981
painted tin and waxed paper
3/4 x 3 3/4 x 2 3/8 in. (1.9 x 9.5 x 6 cm.)
The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Founding Collection, Contribution The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.
TC318.245.1.1-TC318.245.2b

Photocopy of John Cale's Passport, undated
8 1/2 x 11 in. (21.59 x 27.94 cm.)
The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Founding Collection, Contribution The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.
© Crown copyright. Reproduced with permission by the Controller of Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, and Queen Printer for Scotland. 2010 
TC315.156 

For those less talented and less famous than Warhol, the “Queen of the Night” (also known as Regine Zylberberg and the owner of Regine’s nightclub), employed an advisory committee to review applications for club membership. The lucky few who were selected could purchase a $600 membership that granted free admission with up to 7 friends. 

Regine’s Gold Card in Cartier Case, undated
The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Founding Collection, Contribution The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.
TC314.102.3.1-TC314.102.3.2

Memberships and admission were so exclusive at Regine’s that the New York State Liquor Authority investigated the club for “social discrimination.” Andy, however, didn’t have any trouble getting in. 

 Letter from Regine Zylberberg to Andy Warhol, January 22, 1981
5 x 7 in. (12.7 x 17.78 cm.)
The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Founding Collection, Contribution The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.
TC314.102.2

Recently, the Time Capsules Cataloguing Project came across, in TC314, a gold-plated Regine’s membership card in a leather Cartier case, already engraved with Andy’s name, given, Regine writes, “as a token of my friendship.” No, Andy didn’t have to wait outside, hoping to be let in.  He sauntered in without even needing the highly sought-after gold card, which he unceremoniously tossed into his January 1981 Time Capsule.  

 Regine's Gold Card in Cartier Case, undated
The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Founding Collection, Contribution The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.
TC314.102.3.1-TC314.102.3.2