I admired the Pop Art of Andy Warhol and was glued to his Campbell's Soup Cans at MoMA ever since studying art history at Rutgers College in 1996.

There has always been speculation about Warhol’s ancestry - his family, the Warholas, came from a Rusyn background in Pittsburgh, part of the diverse Carpathian region whose communities share deep cultural ties with Ukrainians.

The connection became personal when my older son chose to attend Carnegie Mellon University, “because Warhol studied there.” I visited Pittsburgh’s “Four Mile Run” neighborhood (Rusyn Valley), Warhol’s parish church - St. John Chrysostom Byzantine Catholic—and spoke with parishioners who remembered the Warhola family.

My journey continued to Slovakia’s Medzilaborce and Miková, the Warhola family’s place of origin, where I found striking similarities to Ukrainian culture, especially through the old Rusyn and Lemko Greek Catholic churches.

From these experiences grew the idea for an exhibition imagining Warhol as a Ukrainian icon - whimsical, open to interpretation, not Pop in style but Pop in spirit. Just as Warhol elevated everyday objects into icons of “Pop Art”, three contemporary Ukrainian artists here have elevated Warhol into a “Ukrainian Icon,” placing his image into dialogue with Ukrainian history and culture.

“Kozak Warhola” by Volodymyr Radko, “Warhol in the Steppes of Ukraine” by Vladyslav Shereshevsky, and “The Great Andy” polyptych by Oleh Denysenko each masterfully reframe Warhol’s persona through Ukrainian lenses, creating works that are both homage and transformation.

The exhibition was conceptualized in 2022 and most of the works were created in the same year. Because of Russia’s war on Ukraine, the project was postponed.  After a heavy shelling of Kyiv in June of 2025 and the fact that an explosion from a Shahed drone blew the door and windows of Radko's studio, damaging a large Warhol portrait (two pieces of glass are embedded now in the canvas), I decided to go ahead with the show and to take the artwork out of Ukraine immediately.

It is a known fact that Warhol kept a small Byzantine Greek Catholic shrine at home and maintained traditions often associated with Carpatho-Ukrainian faith and culture.

If he was alive today - 97 years old - he would give this exhibition his blessing.

Alexander Demko
September 5, 2025