What Becomes a Legend Most

Warhol’s Marilyn is perhaps the ultimate Pop emblem. By repeating her image in electric, unnatural colors, he stripped Monroe of biography and remade her into a commodity—forever glamorous, forever tragic. In contrast, the Blackglama Judy Garland image plays off an existing advertising campaign, doubling the artifice of celebrity. Garland’s face, already mediated by photography and Hollywood mythology, becomes a brand in Warhol’s hands—her private struggles eclipsed by the aura of legend.

Warhol once said, “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.” His works here suggest something more nuanced: that fame is not only fleeting but fungible.By placing drag queens alongside Monroe and Garland, Warhol collapsed hierarchies between high celebrity and underground culture. Both depend on image, artifice, and endurance in the public eye.

The silkscreens expose how legends are made: through repetition, bold color, and mediation. Warhol understood that icons thrive not on authenticity, but on the relentless projection of image. His Marilyns glow like neon signs; his drag queens radiate defiance in turquoise and vermilion.

For Ladies and Gentlemen, Warhol photographed and silkscreened portraits of Black and Latinx drag queens and trans women, many from the fringes of the 1970s downtown scene. Unlike Monroe or Garland, these sitters were not household names; they were performers who created their own glamour against societal rejection. Warhol saw in them the same fierce theatricality as Hollywood’s great stars, but also something radical: the conscious construction of identity as performance.

In Warhol’s universe, legends are not just remembered—they are made, multiplied, and consumed. The boundary between Hollywood star and nightclub performer dissolves; each becomes an icon not by destiny, but by image.