On Repeat comes to Zimmerli Art Museum

Andy Warhol, Lynda Palevsky, 1973. Polacolor Type 108 on paper; Collection Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University; Gift of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Photo Jack Abraham. © 2025 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Used with permission of @warholfoundation. 

(NEW BRUNSWICK, NJ) — Andy Warhol: On Repeat, on view at the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers from February 11 to July 31, 2026, brings together the artist’s early durational films and later serial photographs to examine repetition and duration as central forces in his art.

Presenting nearly 70 photographs from the Zimmerli’s collection, many on view for the first time, and a suite of films on loan from the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, On Repeat offers a rare look at how Warhol used time, stillness and seriality to chart the shifting terrain of identity.

While Warhol’s pop imagery is widely known, On Repeat reveals a deeper, more searching artist at work. The exhibition presents iconic films of well-known Warhol “Superstars,” including Edie Sedgwick, alongside lesser-exhibited examples from his Screen Tests, the nearly 500 durational film portraits the artist created during the mid-1960s. They highlight figures from Warhol’s world, including avant-garde actors Rufus Collins and Kyoko Kishida, queer performer Mario Montez and Donyale Luna—the first Black model to appear on the covers of both Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue, and the subject of a recent HBO documentary—only now receiving long-overdue attention.

“We’re thrilled to present this fresh perspective on one of the most influential artists of the 20th century,” said Maura Reilly, director of the Zimmerli Art Museum. “The exhibition reflects our museum’s commitment to original scholarship, and it underscores our role as a place where familiar histories are reconsidered and reimagined for new generations.”

Within the galleries, films such as Outer and Inner Space (1966), one of the artist’s most formally and conceptually ambitious projects, are projected as wide as sixteen feet to create immersive environments. Polaroids are presented in vertical towers that evoke photobooth strips, and multiple photographs of the same individual or object reveal Warhol’s obsession with repetition and extended looking as not only a personal preoccupation but also a distinctly American commentary on visibility, performance and the limits of seeing. Visitors will also be able to capture their own screen tests in an in-gallery interactive experience.

“Warhol understood that cameras don’t just record people, they transform them,” said Jeremiah William McCarthy, the museum’s chief curator and curator of the exhibition. “By filming a static sitter for three minutes or photographing someone repeatedly, Warhol preserved individuals either blooming or disappearing under the pressure of being seen. It remains a very relevant insight for our image-obsessed culture.”

Andy Warhol: On Repeat is organized by Jeremiah William McCarthy, Chief Curator and Curator of American Art.

This exhibition is made possible through generous support from donors to the Zimmerli’s Major Exhibition Fund: Kathrin and James Bergin, Sundaa and Randy Jones, Heena and Hemanshu Pandya, and Mark L. Pomerantz, with additional support from Rutgers University.

The Zimmerli’s operations, exhibitions, and programs are funded in part by Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, and income from the Avenir Endowment Fund and the Andrew W. Mellon Endowment Fund, among others. Additional support comes from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, Bloomberg Philanthropies, and the donors, members and friends of the museum.

Generous support for bilingual text was provided by Art Bridges Foundation’s Access for All program. 

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