Brownsville

Brownsville is one of the towns down the river from our place.  It was a major industrial town...the first steamboat that went down the Monogahela to the Ohio to New Orleans and back (under its own power) (1814) "revolutionizing transportation transportation and commerce"...the first cast iron bridge (1834)...the industries of wiskey, of linen, of glassmaking, of papermaking...products all shipped down the river...a Silicon Valley of its time...

but now that past remains but mainly confined to murals on old apartment buildings...

and some "historic buildings" such as the Nemacolin Castle...still inhabited the high hill above the river town...but mostly it is a town in disrepair...hard to see how places like the shuttered Karl's Fashion Center are going to bounce back...even when brightened with flags for the annual fourth of July parade...

Then a barge filled with piles of soft coal, carbon buried nearly 500 million years ago beneath these worn hills, plies its way down river...to a power plant possibly...treading the muddy waters...creating when the dust settles from its being burnt another thin layer to the geologic record...

So I'm working says the billboard in Brownsville...but barely, just barely...

Andy Warhol

So here are these Slovak churches along the river towns, golden domes against a thick, grey sky...the Monogahela moves slowly toward its junction with the Allegheny to form the Ohio...still brown as chocolate at its junction in Pittsburgh...and whom do we find by the merging of these waters and cultures, but Andrew Warhola....

Or his museum...now that he has been dead some 30 years...has it been that long? 



"Andrew Warhola, born Aug. 6, 1928, to Julia and Andrej Warhola, Carpatho-Rusyn immigrants from the village of Mikova in present-day Slovakia.  They attended St. John Chrysotom Byzantine Catholic Church." 

Ahhh the great exponent of pop art...he used to sell his drawings from the fruit and vegetable truck run by his brothers...his father's savings allowed him to go to the Carnegie Institute to study art..after his studies, he went to New York City, quickly becoming one of the most successful commercial illustrators in the city at the time advertising as an industry was exploding....

and, then, well, Andy Warhol the artist.   But here is a connection...the Warhola and the Warhol (Americans, be they Carpatho-Rusyns...always reinventing themselves still bearing the traces of ancestry...

But the Byzantine churches is so full of icons...sacred images whose transparency allows the viewer to gain a glimpse of the divine...

and is that not what he did for the 20th century?  Create icons of the divine, the unattainable, allowing us to gain a vision of the heaven beyond our earthly, mortal existence...

But, of course, he did more than portraits (tho' man did he make a lot of money at that)...he did movies, made some of the first graphic art, experimented with styles and music, held court at The Factory...and, yet, this continuity of iconography...out of the churches...and into the worship of celebrity and glamor...well, that may prove his true legacy.