From modest beginnings in Brooklyn and suburban Long Island, Bob Colacello’s life has taken him from Andy Warhol’s Factory to Nancy Reagan’s inner circle. For over five decades, he has been both an observer and a participant in some of the most important and fascinating cultural, social, and political scenes in the United States and Europe. He’ll be joining us at the Redwood discussing his book Holy Terror: Andy Warhol Close Up.
Thursday, August 17th
5.30 pm
Free
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Bob Colacello was born in Brooklyn, NY, and raised on Long Island. He graduated from Georgetown University School of Foreign Service in 1969, and Columbia University Graduate School of the Arts in 1971 with an MFA in Film. By then he had been hired to run Andy Warhol’s new magazine, Interview, a job he held for thirteen years, becoming one of the artist’s closest creative collaborators. His memoir of that period, Holy Terror: Andy Warhol Close Up, was acclaimed by The New York Times, as “the best-written and the most killingly observed” book on the so-called Pope of Pop.From 1984 to 2017, Colacello was under exclusive contract to Vanity Fair, writing profiles and investigative pieces on cultural, social, and political subjects. In 2004, he published the first of a two-volume biography of the Reagans, Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House. He is currently writing the second volume on the White House years and afterward. He is the co-author, with photographer Jonathan Becker, of Studios by the Sea: Artists of the East End of Long Island.
In 2017, Colacello curated his first exhibition at Vito Schnabel Gallery in St. Moritz, Switzerland. The show, The Age of Ambiguity: Abstract Figuration / Figurative Abstraction, featured works by Jean-Michel Basquiat, The Bruce High Quality Foundation, Jeff Elrod, Jacqueline Humphries, Rashid Johnson, Jeff Koons, Adam McEwen, Sterling Ruby, Borna Sammak, Julian Schnabel, Andy Warhol, and Jonas Wood. A selection of Colacello’s photographs from the late 1970s and early 1980s was published by 7L Steidl in 2007, under the title OUT. Solo exhibitions of Colacello’s photographs have been presented at Vito Schnabel Projects, New York; Vito Schnabel Gallery, St. Moritz; Mary Boone Gallery, New York, NY; Govinda Gallery, Washington D.C.; Steven Kasher Gallery, New York, NY; the Boca Raton Museum of Art, Florida, and the Newport Art Museum, Rhode Island. Colacello’s photographs have been included in group exhibitions at the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA; MoMA PS1, Long Island City, NY; Tate Modern, London; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Hamburger Kunsthalle, Germany; and Museu Serralves, Portugal.
In February 2021, Elena Foster’s Ivory Press presented a solo exhibition of Colacello’s photographs in Madrid, accompanied by a book, It Just Happened: Photographs by Bob Colacello 1976-1982. In January of 2023, Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery in Paris showed Colacello’s photographs, followed by an exhibition at Ropac’s London gallery in June.
