They Opened 610 Boxes and Found a Mummified Foot: Andy Warhol’s Time Capsules

The archive of the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. A staff member opened a white gift box and found a brown lump inside.

At first, it is said, nobody knew what it was. On closer inspection it was the foot of an ancient Egyptian mummy.

It was in one of the 610 boxes Andy Warhol left behind. Warhol called them Time Capsules.

A Habit Born from a Move

It began with a studio move in 1974. While packing, someone suggested putting everything into boxes and calling them time capsules, and Warhol loved the idea.

From then until his death in 1987, he swept whatever piled up on his desk into brown cardboard boxes, dated them and sealed them. Full boxes were taped shut and sent to storage. He meant to sell them as art one day, but they never went on the market.

What Was Inside

Most of it was junk: taxi receipts, fan mail, invitations, press clippings, airline cutlery, a half-eaten loaf of nut bread, dead bees, even toenail clippings.

Mixed in were treasures: works by other artists, hundreds of snapshots, a Ramones record signed by Joey Ramone. Items from his 1968 hospital stay after being shot survive in Time Capsule 4.

With foundation funding, the museum spent years opening the boxes one by one and cataloguing every object, finishing around 2014. One cataloguer described her job as being secretary to a dead man.

Between Rubbish and Art

Whether the boxes are art or rubbish is still debated. But because they preserve thirteen years of one man’s life almost unedited, some argue they show Warhol more accurately than any of his portraits.

At his grave in Bethel Park, outside Pittsburgh, people still leave cans of Campbell’s soup. Since 2013 the museum has streamed the grave live, around the clock. A fitting end for a man obsessed with recording everything.

Andy Warhol, Time Capsules

Artist: Andy Warhol (1928–1987, USA)
Period: 1974–1987
Scale: 610 boxes (plus a trunk and filing cabinets)
Collection: The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh (opened 1994)

Sources: NPR, CBS News, Carnegie Museums, The Spectator, Far Out Magazine
Photos: Cbaile19, CC0 / Toohool, CC BY-SA 4.0 / WilliamDenton, CC0 (Wikimedia Commons)