Andy Warhol was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1928. In 1949, after graduating from the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, Warhol moved to New York to work as a commercial illustrator for advertisements. Using familiar subject matter and techniques, Warhol began painting images of mass-produced objects such as the Campbell's Soup can and the Coca-Cola bottle. His paintings gained immediate recognition for their offensive, yet intriguing, banal imagery.

Warhol worked in screenprint, a mostly commercial medium without fine art antecedents. Warhol's prints reflected consumer culture in their purposefully unrefined appearance and factory-made execution. Beginning with snapshots found in the media, he created prints that inundated viewers with images of grief and hope, violence, and national tragedy. Warhol's formalized paintings and prints of household commodities and media imagery blurred the line between commercial and fine art, while simultaneously recording the turbulent decade of the 1960’s.

Warhol's work is included in numerous public collections worldwide including the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, New York; Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, Germany; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts; Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Tate Modern, London, England; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota; and the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.