Paige Powell Captured Warhol’s Final Days Up Close

It wasn’t Paige Powell’s intention to become the unofficial documentarian of the 1980s New York art scene, but she was embedded in it. Powell worked in ad sales at magazine and would become its associate publisher. She was one of founder Andy Warhol’s closest confidantes during the final years of his life.

“I just took photographs, but I wasn’t obsessed,” she said. “It was Andy who encouraged me. I was in my environment with all these different artists. They were just my friends. So it didn’t have a purpose. But basically, Andy was so comfortable with me and my camera—it was just a part of my body. It was like a limb or something.” Just as her mentor was “married” to “Sony,” his tape recorder, Powell became inseparable from her camera.

Powell’s new exhibition, “Private Andy: Religious Services,” is on view at Jeffrey Deitch in Los Angeles until April 4. It’s comprised of a 1986 series of Warhol volunteering at a Bronx church to serve meals to the homeless during the holidays, alongside a series of accidental double exposures made during a 10-day period in February 1987. The images span from a fashion show at the Tunnel nightclub, where Warhol was one of the models, to the artist’s funeral and burial; laughing friends from the week prior are overlaid upon mourners. The intimate shots capture Warhol’s final days while echoing many of his enduring themes: spirituality, chance, devotion, and the strange overlap of life and death.

A film component—a collaboration with EarthCam and the Andy Warhol Museum—links the gallery to a live feed of the Pop artist’s grave in Pittsburgh. It may seem grim, but Powell attested, “Andy would have loved it.”

Not A Fly on the Wall

Powell was at the nexus of various New York creative scenes, documenting these artists and moments, but she was also a creative force within them. It was Powell who helped instigate projects behind the scenes, from pairing artists for the iconic Absolut ads through the vodka brand’s agency, to facilitating moments like Warhol’s early experiments with digital portraiture, including the now-famous 1985 Debbie Harry image made on a Commodore Amiga. A familiar name across the vast canon of Warhol literature, such as , Powell can come off as a kind of normie foil to the Factory crowd, when in fact she was a quirky Pacific Northwest character—bringing with her Oregon-bred fixations on exercise and health food—and a connective lynchpin, as much instigator as muse. Spend even a short time with her and it becomes clear: she is largely devoid of judgment, deeply interested in the people around her, and as responsible for shaping the scene as she was for capturing it.

Cecilia Dean, cofounder of , is co-producing a documentary about fashion designer Isabel Toledo with Powell. “Paige is one of those super low-key, savvy people who is able to connect the dots in a way that maybe other people aren’t seeing,” Dean said. “She knows when disparate elements need to come together.”

Powell tends to stay just outside the frame. “There’s a whole other documentary waiting to happen about her,” Dean said, “but I don’t think she would ever do it. She’s very much in the moment and is part of these great moments in history, but she never wants to be the center of attention.”

Powell’s first exhibition took place in 1984 at the East Village bar Beulah Land, where she covered the walls—and ceiling—with photographs of Warhol, Madonna, and a rotating cast of artists, musicians, and nightlife habitués. Immersive and dense, it placed viewers directly inside that social milieu, where they themselves became a face in the glittering crowd. In 2019, the project was revisited through a limited-edition book series produced with Gucci.

Early last month, Powell, in a fleece jacket with a broad-brimmed straw hat and leggings, walked through the 12-acre Portland Japanese Garden. She was excited to show me the bonsai trees, but when we arrived, we learned they had been taken in for winter. We were visiting during “Moss Appreciation Week,” and clumps of different varieties were displayed upon plinths. We decamped to the café for miso soup.

Powell moved back to Oregon in 1994 to devote most of her time to animal activism. “After Andy died, it was horrible on so many levels,” Powell said. “I wanted to just move out of the city. Rumors were going around that was folding because of competition. We had a big drop in advertisers, and I thought, I’m not leaving this magazine. I was compelled to stay until whatever it took to leave on a high note.”

Auspicious Beginnings

When Powell first arrived in New York from Portland in 1980, she was no ingénue. Her varied CV included stints at Blue Ribbon Sports (which would later become Nike) and as the public affairs director at the Washington Park Zoo, as well as working in the zoo’s nursery and teaching chimpanzees sign language.

She knew she wanted to work at . “I didn’t think that the real Andy Warhol would be at the place where I was going to apply for a job,” Powell said. “I looked up the address in the phone book and took the bus down to Union Square, where they had daily shootouts. Everybody gets up really early in Portland, so I showed up at 860 Broadway at 8 a.m., and no one answered the door.”

She went to a coffee shop on the corner and returned every half hour until some staff arrived at 10:30. “Ronnie Cutrone, one of Andy’s technical assistants, opened the door,” Powell said. “Because Andy had been shot, the door was bulletproof. Ronnie was being really flirty. And I said, ‘I want to apply for a job,’ and he started laughing and said, ‘Come on in.’ He walks me into a room and there are three people sitting around a table, and Ronnie goes, ‘Here’s someone to see you,’ and then he runs away.”

It was the ad director Barbara Colacello and editors Gail Love and Robert Hayes. “I said, ‘I came to apply for a job,’ and they said, ‘Are you kidding? Celebrities do the interviews or Andy does. Have you ever sold anything before?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, elephant manure for gardens.’ And they just started screaming.”

“They thought that was crazy,” Powell said. “I said they didn’t get it. It was a way to make money for the zoo. It was really great fertilizer. We had the largest herd of Asian and African elephants in North America.”

Then they asked how she sold it.

“We sold it by the truckload, or you could buy it by the pound,” Powell said. “And then I pointed out that you have to let it aerate first, because fresh elephant manure is very high in nitrogen and ammonia. If you put it straight on a garden, it’s too strong and can burn the plants. I got it into and all these other publications.”

“They said, ‘Well, if she can sell doo-doo, she could probably sell ads.’”

Powell got the job. She explained, “This was the philosophy: We don’t sell any ads to people who are mean, and if we don’t like the aesthetics, we’ll offer a free redesign.” It was a close-knit team where work and life and art blurred.

Archiving the Archivist

Later that day, we drove to see Powell’s archive, housed in the top story of her friend’s cast-iron building downtown.

“Paige’s memory is intact because she never did drugs, and she’s the only one who’s still around,” said Thomas Mack Lauderdale, who met her through Gus van Sant when she returned to the city. “I’d go over to her house and slowly became aware of these 40 boxes of stuff in her garage. None of it was organized—Polaroids separated from contact sheets, separated from negatives. It was a huge mess. Eventually, we brought them here and started archiving. It’s been more than 10 years now.”

“We were a family,” Powell said of working at . “All of a sudden you hear rumors, and you hear people are getting sick. And then it became real at the office. You didn’t even say AIDS back then. It was some other terminology. I lost so many friends.” It is this pall that also hovers over the banquet-sized worktable crammed with halcyon images in front of us: breakdancers showing Warhol some moves at the Factory; an after-hours get-together at art critic Edit DeAk’s loft.

Some of the most striking are of Jean-Michel Basquiat—color-saturated portraits of him painting en plein air upstate and ecstatically blowing soap bubbles in the back seat of a car. One of the most striking is from the series “Jean-Michel Reclining Nude.”

“Jean-Michel had no body issues at all,” Powell said. “There is no sexual connotation. It was just to show him as a dude. This was on a Sunday evening. He was watching cartoons. He was smoking some pot. He was painting, and he had a stack of records that he had just bought off Columbus Avenue. He was lounging like a regular person and not in this light of being a god or something.”

Powell dated Basquiat, and detail the couple’s ups and downs. “Our relationship was off and on,” she said. “We always got back together again, and then it would be off and then back on.” Eighteen of Powell’s images were included in 2023’s “Basquiat x Warhol” at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris.

“Jean-Michel was so young at the time—he liked to portray himself as someone who lived out on the streets and that his father was a tyrant. Well, that’s not the way it was. He loved his father, but there was a jealousy—that’s how I interpreted it—and they antagonized each other. Even though his father knew he was incredibly talented from a very young age, he came from a difficult background. They had to leave during the revolution in Haiti, and he lost many relatives there.”

Powell got to know Basquiat when she produced a group show in a friend’s apartment on the Upper West Side, including him alongside graffiti legends like Rammellzee and Lady Pink. Atop the table in the archive is a hand-signed visitor list that reads like a who’s who of the New York art world in the 1980s, the dealer contract between Powell and the artist (Basquiat signed his portion with his crown symbol), and the original price list (works generally in the $8,000–$9,000 range), along with slides and Polaroids of the works and the collectors who acquired them.

This is just part of the gold mine of imagery and ephemera. An early devotee to video, Powell frequently shot with a camcorder. “I never looked at the tapes,” she said. “I’d just put them in a box.” She screened me clips from her work; one was Warhol on a shopping outing looking for a new pair of glasses, ending at dinner with Keith Haring. Another stunning video shows Haring in shorts, gracefully painting an elephant statue as the sun sets behind him, set to the artist’s own boombox soundtrack of hip-hop, house, and the Talking Heads’ “Psycho Killer.” At one point, Warhol and his love interest, Jon Gould, enter and begin dancing, before the scene shifts to the group dining together on the Upper East Side.

There are boxes Powell has yet to open. She estimates that about 70 percent of the archive has not yet been scanned. From this stockpile, an idea she is considering: “I really want to do a Harlem, 1981 to 1994 book,” she said. “It was very neighborly up there. There was no pretentiousness. It was like Portland.”

It’s a sentiment that still defines her time in the city. Ever indefatigable, Powell reflected, “I was never bored. Not for a second when I was living in New York.”