The Seattle Art Museum has two new exhibits opening this week on May 13 that are focused around Andy Warhol and Kurt Cobain.

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Through a selection of Andy Warhol’s media works, this exhibition will offer a focused and provocative experience of Warhol’s photography and film portraits. Unfolding in five of the special exhibition galleries, the exhibition includes Polaroids, photo booth strips and sewn photographs, presented alongside Warhol’s Screen Tests, which will be projected in two of the galleries devoted to these moving images.

love fear pleasure lust pain glamour death includes works that compel us to consider the artist’s fascination with all things ephemeral, from beauty and youth to celebrity status. Including photographs and videos dating from the 1960s through the early 1980s—two decades in which the artist’s work had tremendous impact on contemporary art production and culture—the exhibition encourages readings of powerful themes such as fame, desire and identity construction, as well as anxiety and isolation, which often accompany stardom. In a series of self-portraits, with props or disguises such as wigs and women’s clothing, Warhol exposes his obsession with his own image and his desire to probe and push the boundaries of identity and self-invention.

As part of the presentation, SAM has also installed a photo booth where people can take pictures of themselves for an interesting Facebook driven art project. Continue reading more.

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The Kurt exhibit will be featured in the same gallery.

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Kurt Cobain symbolized the ideals, aspirations and disappointments of the ’90s generation, and a diverse array of artists have incorporated his image into their work to comment on those issues. International in scope, the works on view in Kurt range from straightforward portraiture to pieces that show a more subtle assimilation of Cobain’s ethos and idealism in a broad range of media. With works from the early 1990s to the present, by artists such as Rodney Graham, Douglas Gordon and Elizabeth Peyton, among others, this exhibition will cause viewers to question why and how Kurt’s visage and his gestures came to mean so much to a generation.

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