The leader of the Pop Art Movement, Andy Warhol created art about time. In his work, Warhol manipulated manifestations of time and challenged our understanding of how it is perceived. Warhol's paintings, films, and Time Capsules are innovative chronicles of history. His avante-garde films transform time, breakdown conventions of narrative form, and force viewers to see in a new way. Born in Pittsburgh, Pa., in 1927 to immigrant parents, Warhol grew up during the Depression to became one the 20th Century's most influential artists, achieving faine and wealth along the way. His life echoed the script of the "American Dream," while his art simultaneously celebrated, satirized and critiqued postwar American culture. Warhol and his art serve as a natural catalyst for thoughtful investigation of 40 years of social and cultural change. He observed with great clarity the events and images of the world around him. His work, like that of a newspaper reporter or photojournalist, has the appearance of objectivity. However, as with the more commonly understood forms of journalism, what is presented is the product of a complex process of recording, selecting and editing. Warhol carried tape recorders and cameras with him at all times, documenting even the most seemingly mundane events. His paintings of Jackie Kennedy, car crashes, hammers and sickles, and images of fast food hamburgers, as well as his photographs of Hollywood celebrities, appear objective, yet their realism is permeated with draina. His creation of screen tests, cable television programs, and Interview magazine, reveals his obsessive fascination with capturing and packaging our world in the media. Known for dissolving the boundaries between high and low culture, Warhol's most famous artworks used silkscreening techniques to mechanically reproduce consumer images such as Brillo boxes and Campbell's soup cans. Warhol himself became a public figure, his shock white pair and blank expression internationally recognized as symbols of modern art. Warhol's creativity and openness attracted all types of people from the strange to the unusual, such as Valerie Solanas. A paranoid would-be playwright and feminist activist, Valerie Solanas walked into Warhol's studio in lune 1968 with a.32 caliber pistol and shot and wounded the artist. She wanted Warhol to produce lier play, which he found to be vulgar, anti-male and somewhat amusing in its outrageousness. This event was a pivotai one in the life of this celebrated artist. Following the shooting, Warhol slowed his creative output to a trickle and became much less open about letting strange and unusual people like Solanas into his life. He died during routine surgery in 1987, at which time his artistic output was counterweighed by a rise in iconic power. Literature: lnternet, Education Resources Center, programs about Andy Warhol given at the Andy Warhol Museum, ?1996 by the ANdy Warhol Museum; Movie review by Mike Sauter, I Shot Andy Warhol, (1968 film), ?1996 IN Jersey