In 1991, archivists began counting and cataloging the late Andy Warhol's vast possessions at his Manhattan studio, called the Factory. As two of them worked in the Factory basement, they opened a Scottish shortbread cookie tin and found $14,000 in cash inside a manila envelope.

Steve Mellon, Post-Gazette Staff members of The Andy Warhol Museum gather around director Tom Sokowski in the pillow room of the North Side Museum, which celebrates 10 years this month. Click photo for larger image. The Warhol celebrates The Andy Warhol Museum is celebrating its 10th anniversary with a number of events and activities. Tickets for the main event -- the "Garden of Earthly Delights" party -- are $75. The party, which starts at 8 p.m. Saturday, includes a preview of the "Flowers Observed, Flowers Transformed" exhibit, complimentary drinks, light bites, live music and activities inspired by flowers. An after-party celebration, to be held that evening next door to the museum at the Rubinoff building, will feature music by New York disc jockey Neil Aline and Aya, a soulful vocalist. Tickets for the after party are $25. To purchase tickets for either event, or for more information, call 412-237-8300.

The two archivists wrote to the Andy Warhol Foundation, saying Warhol had left behind 140 portraits of Benjamin Franklin. Board members wondered why Warhol had painted Franklin so many times. Eventually, the foundation received the money and board members got the joke.

Years after his death in 1987, Andy Warhol still surprises people.

While his work dominated the art world, Warhol relished his celebrity and played various roles: cagey peasant, graphic artist, illustrator of shoe ads, compulsive collector of jewelry, antiques and taxidermist-stuffed animals, minimalist filmmaker, publisher of Interview magazine, printmaker, sculptor and innovative iconographer of America's culture of consumerism.

It was typical of Warhol to stash his money in a cookie tin, said Matt Wrbican, who was there when the $14,000 was found and is now an archivist at The Andy Warhol Museum, which celebrates its 10th anniversary this month. The artist often handed crisp $100 bills to friends and artists whenever he sent them out to purchase food or art supplies.

Fueling Warhol's success was his nonstop drive and determination to approach art in ways as fresh as those $100 bills. As the Pittsburgh native moved from being a commercial illustrator to his favorite role, the crowned, pixieish prince of pop art, he blurred the lines between those two worlds, said Daina Augaitis, curator at the Vancouver Art Gallery in Vancouver, British Columbia. The largest art gallery in Western Canada is showing Warhol's drawings and prints, which are rarely seen. By 1988, civic and museum leaders in Pittsburgh were working to establish a museum dedicated to Warhol. In March of that year, Charles Wright III, then the head of the Dia Foundation in Manhattan, flew to Pittsburgh to meet with Robert Wilburn, then director of The Carnegie. The Dia Foundation owned nearly 200 Warhols but had little capital, and none of the other Manhattan museums were interested in its Warhols.

"The support that [Warhol] has now was nowhere," Wright said.

Here in Pittsburgh, instead of a one-on-one meeting with Wilburn, Wright found himself seated in a conference room at The Carnegie with about 20 museum and civic leaders.

"I was sort of taken by surprise. That level of response was what triggered us to get very serious," said Wright, now chairman of the R.D. Merrill Co. in Seattle, Wash.

Edith "Toto" Fisher believes it is fitting the museum is here because Warhol spent his Saturdays attending art classes at The Carnegie Institute in Oakland and earned his art degree at Carnegie Tech in 1949. Like many Pittsburgh residents, his ethnic roots lay in Eastern Europe because his parents, Ondrej and Julia, emigrated from the Carpatho-Rusyn region of northeastern Slovakia. Warhol left for Manhattan in 1949, followed later by his mother.

"He made us look at art and life in a different way. He changed the course of contemporary art. That doesn't mean everybody has to like it," Edith Fisher said.

"I think the test, for me, is if a work of art continually draws you back to look at it. It's not just pretty and comfortable. It's challenging."

After Warhol died, Fisher's husband, Jim, lunched with Fred Hughes, a close friend of Warhol's and executor of the artist's estate. The Fishers became leaders in the effort to establish the Warhol museum in the renovated Volkwein Building on the North Side. They and others were determined that Warhol's work would not leave Pittsburgh like other great art collections had before, including those of Henry Clay Frick, Paul Mellon, Ailsa Mellon, Duncan Phillips and, most recently, a collection of abstract expressionism by G. David Thompson, a steel entrepreneur.

A home in Pittsburgh

Steve Mellon, Post-Gazette Tom Sokolowski, director of The Andy Warhol Museum on the North Side, stands beneath the skylights on the museum's seventh floor, where a flower exhibition will soon be displayed. The organizations that founded the museum sought a building that had the feel of a warehouse. They searched 32 locations before settling on the Volkwein Brothers Building on Sandusky Street. Click photo for larger image.

The Andy Warhol Museum opened in May of 1994 with a weekend of festivities, and its first 12 months were robust. Nearly 63,000 people visited its exhibits during that inaugural year. Attendance dropped during the next three years with 56,895 visitors in 1995, 47,176 in 1996 and 46,774 in 1997. The number of visitors increased to 67,806 in 1998 and last year, 85,000 people visited the museum.

"We get more out-of-town visitors than anyone else in Pittsburgh," said Tom Sokolowski, director of The Warhol, who cited surveys done by the Greater Pittsburgh Convention and Visitors Bureau.

The Warhol, Sokolowsi said, is part museum, part performance space and part presidential library because of its vast archive. But initially, it was conceived as a division of Carnegie Museum of Art and its first director was Mark Francis, who was hired as curator of 20th-century art. He also traveled the world to gather the art for the Carnegie's International exhibit in 1991. In effect, Francis wore three hats at the Carnegie.

"After a year-and-a-half, it became clear that his talents lay more in curating art, his knowledge about art and critical scholarship about art. He had never been an arts administrator, per se," Sokolowski said.

In 1993, The Carnegie hired Tom Armstrong to lead The Andy Warhol Museum.

"His fund-raising skills were not as successful as they hoped, especially outside of the Pittsburgh market," Sokolowski said. Armstrong left in 1995, and Sokolowski arrived in May 1996.

While museum staff members have worked hard to build a local and international audience, Juliet Lea H. Simonds, chairman of the Warhol board since 1994, said Warhol art collectors and New Yorkers have not supported the museum the way Pittsburghers had hoped.

"All they really did was come to the party and go home. People in New York resent the fact this museum is in Pittsburgh," Simonds said. "But what the museum does for Pittsburgh is of far greater value than it would have in New York City."

Civic and museum leaders believed art collectors would donate money to the museum, but those funds have not materialized.

"A lot of people don't understand his art," Simonds said. "A lot of the gay aspect of it can be difficult for people. A lot of Pittsburgh is conservative. What we have not been able to do is build a loyal base of donors. We can raise money for education and exhibits but not for endowment."

The museum, which has a $1 million endowment, would like to raise $10 million for its endowment in the next four years, Simonds said.

"It's hard to get younger people to be loyal to an institution. We just haven't gotten there yet."

Simonds acknowledges that Pittsburghers may have been a bit naive in their hope that Warhol's admirers would support a museum located in a city the artist himself disliked and left in 1949. Peter Brant, a paper-mill tycoon with a tony Connecticut address, was one of the co-owners of Interview magazine. Brant recently sold some of his Warhols to acquire capital to build a new paper mill, but he has not given money to the museum.

"What is the incentive for him to give to us?" Simonds asked.

The Andy Warhol Museum, Simonds said, "needs a women's committee that isn't a women's committee," referring to the dedicated group of staid volunteers who have raised money for The Carnegie's Museum of Art.

To attract a local audience, Simonds said, the museum has increased the number of musical events, film showings and appearances by performance artists. To generate revenue, it lends works from its collection. But that can create problems because people who come from out of town to see specific works are disappointed if they are out on loan.

'A great American treasure'

Jay Reeg, a native Texan who joined The Warhol board two years ago, works in the sales and marketing department for Hewlett-Packard in the Boston office. Reeg grew up admiring the artist's work and visited the museum a week after it opened and shortly after his wedding in 1994.

"What really drew me to the museum is the sheer fact that it exists. I'll be 51 this month. I liked Warhol as a kid in the late '60s and early '70s, His artistic reputation was still to be determined. Some people did not take it seriously," said Reeg, who owns some Warhol drawings from the 1950s, the gold book that features Warhol's hand-colored drawings (only 100 copies were made) and a 1968 soup can.

The Andy Warhol Museum, Reeg said, is "a great American treasure. Paris has the Picasso Museum and Pittsburgh has The Warhol. He is probably one of the most important artists of the second half of the 20th century."

Since its opening, the museum has staged some memorable exhibits. John Smith, assistant director for collections, said the Jean Cocteau exhibit demonstrated similarities between the French artist and Warhol as well as "how each of them crafted these very elaborate personas as what an artist should be."

In 2001, the museum exhibited "Without Sanctuary," a series of photographs and postcards that depicted lynchings of African Americans.

"Pittsburgh is to be commended for having that shown there. The Warhol did a great job of trying to establish a dialogue with the community and trying to address some hard-core topics," Reeg said.

Sokolowski loved an exhibit called "The Architecture of Reassurance: Designing the Disney Theme Parks." Warhol adored the cozy designs Walt Disney employed in his theme parks, which were patterned after small-town America even as throngs of Americans fled cities for homogenous suburbs and cookie-cutter malls.

"In pop culture, there was a lot of symbolism and iconography," Sokolowski said, citing Warhol's Brillo boxes as an example.

"If you look at the Brillo box, not only is it a good price, it's a product that doesn't take much elbow grease. It's in a red, white and blue box. If you buy it, you're patriotic."

In creating his art, Warhol made the point that "it's not just in high art that we play these games, but it's all over. That's why high and low art began to merge," Sokolowski said.

Television shows such as "The Swan" and "Nip/Tuck," which turn plastic surgery into drama by showing plain people trying to transform themselves into Grace Kelly, would not have surprised Warhol, Sokolowski said.

"Who wants to hire a fat person? Who wants to hire someone with wrinkles? We package people and I think ultimately, what Warhol understood is that packaging is an art form. ... Our culture is sick, and Warhol knew that."

Sokolowski sees an opportunity through programming to address some of these concerns and interject vitality into the local social dialogue.

The museum continually expands the kind of art it shows while maintaining focus on Warhol and his legacy through such exhibitions as the "Warhol Look," which was about fashion, or surveys of his drawings, photographs and collections. In recent years, exhibitions have addressed racism, the assassination of John F. Kennedy and capital punishment.

The museum, Sokolowski said, must be attuned to the culture of the nation's artistic movements as well as changes in the business world and consumer culture.

"Unless ... you are responsive to what contemporary culture and society and economics are doing or how they are behaving, you're not going to be true to the credo of Andy Warhol."