It’s not every day Andy Warhol comes to town.

But Warhol, in the form of his art, is indeed in Texarkana.

Three of his “Sunset” prints highlight “Landscape: Selections from the Wachovia Securities Art Collection,” an exhibit at the Regional Arts Center running through Dec. 6.



The exhibit brings world-famous artists and uncommon artistic depth and originality to town.

Curated by Wachovia Securities’ Shelley Hagen, who was in town for an opening reception a little more than a week ago, the exhibit is also a team effort between the local Wachovia Securities branch and the Texarkana Regional Arts and Humanities Council.

Warhol, Christo, Helen Frankenthaler, and Roy Lichtenstein are just a few of the more famous artists included.

Warhol created 472 “Sunset” images—each with a distinct color combination. Now three of them beckon local art enthusiasts from the main RAC gallery room.

For each, it’s a simple scene of a setting sun redone with different colors. Dominant color combinations here are varying shades of orange and rose, green and tan, and then green and a lighter, nearly pea green.

Though not the take on popular consumer culture seen in much of his famed work (Campbell’s Soup cans, Coca-Cola bottles, Marilyn Monroe), the “Sunset” series shows some hallmarks of Warhol’s Pop Art sensibility. Namely, it’s the idea of mass-produced art.

“Andy Warhol created a workshop that operated very much like a mechanized factory setting. He really did want to do the utmost to be like a machine,” said Hagen. “And that may not necessarily play out in how the pieces appear.”

Even the toning on the “Sunset” series, though not as explicit, reminds her of a mechanized toning process favored by Lichtenstein. “Just the notion that a group of people produced these kind of like an assembly line,” Hagen said.

At one time, the entire series was displayed in Minneapolis at the Hotel Marquette.

Hagen said the hotel once contained Warhols in every single room. Eventually all the pieces were removed and sold off. “They’re scattered all over,” said Hagen.

While Christo and his wife Jeanne-Claude may not have come to Texarkana to wrap up the RAC, two photographs and a drawing represent their work on “Running Fence,” which at one time looked like a curving line of pillowcases planted over the California hills in Marin and Sonoma counties.

With a length of 24.5 miles and a height of 18 feet, the fabric fence installation truly took over the landscape decades ago as a comment perhaps on the divergence between human constructions and the natural world’s way of creation.

The installation ran through many private properties. As sometimes happens with installation pieces, de-installation began soon (two weeks) after the work was completed in 1976. To get the project completed, Christo and Jeanne-Claude went through court and furnished an environmental impact report.

Christo used to only list his own name with his inimitable projects, but his wife, who always worked with him, is now named with their pieces.

She shied away from the attention, said Hagen, but now her name is rightfully noted along with his.

“They think with grand sense of proportions,” said Hagen about Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s work.

A sense of originality in confronting such a massive project extends to the way they fund work like “Running Fence.” Their pieces at the RAC are examples of art that rises out of art.

“There’s a lot of expense involved, including art material, the labor, the hearings, all the years in court trying to get it improved. So to fund that they create artwork both in the process of actually pulling the project together and afterwards, too, of how they remember it. Or they’ll go back and pull pieces and work on them again,” she said.

So they really do sponsor their own artwork through selling parts of it, representing the project process itself, she said. She believes “Running Fence” has something to say about the interplay of humans and nature.

“It’s also a very obvious human invasion of the environment. Something here is not like the others, so that juxtaposition is very striking and I think it engages you a bit more because it is so unexpected,” Hagen said.

“Some people may argue it’s easy to dismiss—well, it’s just fabric,” she said. But there’s a constant process behind it, getting the community involved and creating a work that touched hundreds of lives both directly and indirectly.

Lichtenstein, like Warhol, was a Pop Art sensation. His piece on display at the RAC shows a sense of humor and creativity as it reshapes the classic idea of landscape.

Artists through the centuries have done just that—take classic themes and rework them for a new day and new audience.

Lichtenstein’s piece pictures a simple, idyllic beach scene. Variously sized blue dots seem to represent the water.

“He has incorporated his usual Pop play with the Benday dots simulating the mechanical printing process,” said Hagen. “However, he also decided to start exploring other artists’ work—say, for example, genre pieces or typical landscape.”

Lichtenstein would re-imagine paintings like Paul Cezanne’s still lifes.

“We have a wonderful still life like Cezanne, only it’s Lichtenstein’s reinterpretation of Cezanne’s still life. It’s very fun, it’s very similar in ambition to this (piece on exhibit in Texarkana),” said Hagen.

The Benday dots, she explained, make a commercial printing process pattern used to add tone. You can see it if you look closely at newspaper comics.

“It’s very similar to the Pop work that was being explored by Andy Warhol,” said Hagen.

The Lichtenstein serigraph on display here was actually one of his last works, produced the year before his death. He and Warhol confronted similar themes of mechanized art.

“They were both exploring the concept of taking the human element out of it, and what if the artwork were such that it seemed produced by a machine only,” she said.

For the crowd on hand for the “Landscapes” opening, the exhibit struck an impressive chord, judging by the buzz in the Regional Arts Center’s gallery rooms.

“This is an extremely well curated show—one of the best I’ve ever seen anywhere, very nice,” said Kay Thomas, TRAHC’s anchor artist in visual arts for the ArtsSmart program.

“It has a variety of different mediums. It’s all the same thing of a landscape, and the people of Texarkana are getting to see some very famous art. It covers many different time periods.”

The Warhols, though, seem atypical to her because the edges in many of his works are crisp and linear, unlike those in “Sunset.”

“This is definitely not Pop imagery. Warhol is showing what he knows about color,” said Thomas.

There’s also diversity with a number of female artists, she said, noting Frankenthaler’s piece, for example. The piece on display here in Texarkana is small for Frankenthaler, a color field painter, said Thomas.

“Normally her things are very big because they want to distort the spatial relationship between the viewer and the art,” she said. “She was every bit as great an artist as (Jackson) Pollock, but was ignored by the canon—because she was a woman—until the ‘70s.”

“If you want to see famous art ... people need to get out here. Because normally you have to go drive a couple of hours to a big, old museum to see this,” Thomas said.

For Hagen, it’s a rewarding job being curator of a financial company’s extensive art collection.

This traveling exhibit has almost 50 pieces. More than 40 artists are represented.

A.G. Edwards (now Wachovia Securities) began the traveling program in 1991 after initiating the collection in 1967. The collection consists of more than 4,500 pieces, reaching as far back as 200 years.

In addition to artwork like paintings, etchings, lithographs, photographs, and prints, historical pieces and furniture are part of it.

“I really do love my job,” said Hagen about overseeing the collection. She said Wachovia is able to offer the exhibit at a more affordable price for finance-strapped art galleries. That, she said, makes her feel good about doing her work of overseeing the collection.

Wachovia arranges approximately eight to 10 shows a year. They focus on small- to medium-sized communities because corporations that do have collections will rarely loan their work and usually show in big cities, said Hagen.

“I thought it would make more sense to focus on the communities that don’t get to have the big, huge, blockbuster shows,” Hagen said.

In addition to Texarkana, the show is headed to destinations like Bay City and Port Huron, Mich., Columbus, Ga., and Des Moines, Iowa, this year.

“We really do cover the country,” Hagen said.

For her, there’s much to consider.

“I’m thinking about a number of things. I’m thinking about the strengths and the weaknesses of the collection and how could we bolster up those weaknesses, how can we find pieces that speak to those particular elements or movements that are not represented much,” Hagen said.

At least 10 percent of the collection travels, and through the year she’ll mix up that road exhibit, almost like a manager overseeing a roster of players.

“I like to mix it up and I’ll put some pieces back on (the Wachovia Securities) campus and take a few others and put them into the rotation,” said Hagen.

“Some of the pieces are so popular, though,” she said. “For a while some of the employees were sad because some of their favorite pieces were going traveling.”

For Texarkana, though, that traveling show has brought some welcome visitors artwork to nurture the mind’s own landscape.