The Bunker Artspace

Whitney Museum                      

Beth Rudin DeWoody – the daughter of the late real estate mogul Lew Rudin, is a New Yorker through and through. However, while she serves on the Boards of the Whitney Museum of American Art, The New School and The Brooklyn Academy of Music, among others,  she is also on the Photography Committee at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, where she maintains a second home. In 2017, she opened The Bunker Artspace to house and share her abundant personal collection of art.

Robert Mapplethorpe to Niki de Saint Phalle

Built in the 1920s as a toy factory and utilized as a munitions armory during World War II, The Bunker provides the perfect stage to showcase the wide range of contemporary art by both well-known and emerging artists she has acquired – from Robert Mapplethorpe and Niki de Saint Phalle to Lee Quiñones and Jamaican-born artist Ebony G. Patterson. The collection is only shown by invitation and through scheduled private tours.  “I created The Bunker Artspace because I wanted a place to show my art collection and curate thematic shows. I wanted to invite art lovers and those new to art, not just to see my collection, but to see that Palm Beach was catching up to the Miami art scene,” says DeWoody.

SoHo Art Scene

DeWoody’s interest in art took root as a child where she attended the Rudolf Steiner School in NYC and the University of California, Santa Barbara. She also took classes at the New School – where she met Benny Andrews and acquired her first piece from him. After marrying artist James DeWoody, she began to get deeply involved in the SoHo art scene where she began to nurture young contemporary artists such as E.V. Day and Tom Sachs. She and DeWoody share two children: Kyle and Carlton DeWoody, both now involved in the art world as well. In 2012, she remarried to photographer Firooz Zahedi. Beth’s passion, vision and continuing support of emerging and, at times overlooked, artists have helped redefine the boundaries of collecting. Along with co-curators Laura Dvorkin and Maynard Monrow, she has assembled a collection that is truly unique.

New Show: Celebrity

Themed rooms  at the Bunker include Celebrity – an exhibition of more than fifty photographs both by and of the late Andy Warhol, juxtaposed to one another and curated entirely from the Collection. Accompanying the artworks are aluminum-painted walls, an homage to The Factory, and two antiques—a silver Zenith projector and an oversized Contax camera presented at the 1939 World’s Fair. It has been said that “Beth’s collections have collections,” and this is truly the case with Warhol. An internal database search will find close to 300 works, and that includes editioned monographs and rare books also residing in the Collection. Drawn to atypical or early examples by artists, she admires works demonstrating risk or an integral step in the artist’s practice. While her Collection does not include the quintessential Basquiat, she has Working Class Heroes, a drawing the artist made when he was merely 17.

Andy Warhol

“I met Andy a few times in New York during the ‘70s and was friends with many that ran in his circle. My husband Firooz shot for Interview magazine and knew Andy well. I always had a sense of Andy’s importance in the art world and popular culture. I have an extensive collection of ephemera and photography of this period, so images of Andy by the great photographers of the time are historically important to me, as well as his Polaroids,” says DeWoody.

Warhol Polaroids

Taken between 1974-1986, these Warhol Polaroids, are unique pieces of history and not something the viewer often sees. As many of the polaroids went on to become studies for Warhol’s most-known works, in them we witness how his mind works and what inspires Him. Intentionally exhibited in their original, acquired frames, the variability in framing illustrates DeWoody’s collecting over time. A portrait of Robert Rauschenberg was the first polaroid that Beth acquired, around twenty years ago. The celebrity line-up depicts what she collected since then—Halston, Truman Capote and Dolly Parton, among others.

In the second segment, the camera is turned to focus on Warhol, a man that for the most part was found behind the camera, directing his subjects. Important photographers of the time, such as Editta Sherman, Philippe Halsman, and Robert Mapplethorpe, shine their gaze upon him in diverse ways—capturing Andy in action, joyous, posed, and at times vulnerable, pensive, tender, and humble. These are moments when the “Andy” persona dissipates and magical details—a smile, a gesture, a glance— reveal themselves.

Elizabeth Taylor  & Firooz Zahedi

“I’d returned from a trip to Iran with Elizabeth Taylor, and we were staying at the Waldorf Towers in Manhattan. Elizabeth wanted to have Halston come over for drinks. Andy knew I was in NY, so he called and wanted to meet Elizabeth. When I suggested that she invite Andy, since he was friends with Halston, she said absolutely not! I asked why, and she said he’d made a fortune selling paintings of her and had neither gotten her permission nor ever offered her one of the paintings. Somehow I charmed her into including him. He was thrilled and put on his best behavior. She suggested to him that he should publish my photos of her in Iran for Interview magazine. He was more than happy to do so. Though I’d been shooting for Interview for a few years, I now got a cover story and Andy established a friendship with Elizabeth that lasted until he passed away. He never gave her a painting – too cheap to do that – but did give her a lithograph of herself. Back then the lithos went for very little, but after she passed away when Christie’s auctioned her possessions, hers sold for over $600,000!” says Beth’s husband Firooz Zahedi.

Coinciding with the Brooklyn Museum’s Revelation, the Lighthouse ArtCenter’s Warhol! Warhol! Warhol!, and too many international exhibitions to count, it proves that decades after Andy’s passing we are still Warhol-enamored. He is just as much an enigmatic icon now as he was then. Simply put, Warhol’s obsession was with the Celebrity, and our obsession is with him.

The Bunker Art Space 2021/2022 Season is currently on view until May 13, 2022.

Reservations required: www.thebunkerartspace.com