Berman Museum Exhibition at Ursinus College Features Photos of Public Nappers and Andy Warhol Film

From the mid-1960s through the 1970s, New York-based
photographer Michael Putnam captured images of people around the world sleeping
in public places. His sleepers, found sprawled in parks, curled up on benches,
and contorted into all sorts of unlikely positions, were seen in passing,
photographed, and left to sleep on. 
Putnam’s distinctive photos, which have been called “rich” and
“profound,” will be at the Philip and Muriel Berman Museum of Art in
Collegeville, Pa., starting July 8, accompanied by an excerpted DVD
presentation of Andy Warhol’s legendary film Sleep (1963).

Michael Putnam, now 77, is celebrated for his visual essays
on communities around the globe. His projects have focused on such topics as
family life in Tokyo, Hindu customs along the Ganges River in India, and fading
aspects of small-town American life. A book of his photographs of old-fashioned
cinemas in states of decay, Silent Screens: The Decline and Transformation of
the American Movie Theater, was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in
July 2000. Exhibitions of the photographs of movie houses were held at the
Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., and George Eastman House, Rochester,
N.Y. 

At the Berman, Putnam’s humorous and poignant photographs of
dozing city-dwellers are paired with a presentation of Warhol’s first film,
also called Sleep. But unlike the photographs, which document public sites and
anonymous individuals, Warhol’s Sleep is an intimate, real-time portrait of the
poet John Giorno at rest, a landmark of conceptual cinema.

A special lecture on Warhol’s film work by Geralyn Huxley,
Curator of Film and Video at the Andy Warhol Museum (one of the four Carnegie
Museums of Pittsburgh, Pa.), will be held on Oct. 23 at 7 p.m. A one-night,
big-screen presentation of Warhol’s Sleep in its entirety (5 hours, 21 min)
will immediately follow Huxley’s lecture.

A fall celebration in honor of the closing of Sleep and the
opening of the Berman’s next exhibition, Good Neighbors, will be held on Oct.
23 from 4 to 7 p.m.

ALSO at the Berman Museum:

77 Portraits, on display until Sept. 21, bringing together
77 works across a range of mediums and time periods, all of which feature the
human face or figure. The works on display vary from a seventeenth-century oil
painting to the earliest types of photographs, by artists both anonymous and
universally acclaimed. Together they demonstrate that across the ages, the urge
to make pictures of people—to make portraits—endures. Artists include Dali, Man
Ray, Giacometti and Lichtenstein.