Incoming Executive Director of the Andy Warhol Museum Mario Rossero is as multifaceted as the museum’s namesake. Rossero is an educator, working artist, and administrative professional who brings decades of experience to the role, including starting his career as an arts educator in 1994 at the Warhol in his early twenties. His appointment as Executive Director is a “homecoming” to the Warhol and the city of Pittsburgh, where his roots still lie.
Executive Director Mario Rossero Brings an “Artist’s Mindset” to the Warhol
In Rossero’s art practice, which he has maintained all throughout his career in Pittsburgh and Chicago public schools and as Executive Director at the National Art Education Association (NAEA), he makes mixed-media collage and drawings. All of his work begins as ink or pencil drawings, which he then layers over each other to create deconstructed collages. There are echoes of Raymond Pettibon in the cursive script and evocative ink shading of his works on paper. “The big picture is that I’m a working artist, and I feel having that internal experience of being a maker is essential to the role [of Executive Director]. What that affords me is that I have an insider perspective of the artist mindset,” he said.
Rossero said the curatorial direction of the museum has been on “my mind, the Warhol’s mind, and the community’s mind.” But he doesn’t want to rush to fill the role, and instead will focus on the existing resources at the Warhol before moving forward curatorially. “In meeting with the staff when I was onsite, they have been doing such a good job caring for the collection and putting on great exhibitions,” he said. He described himself as a “process-oriented” leader who looks at things from every perspective and takes time and care to find the best way to do things. “I’m a big collaborator, I spend a lot of time bringing people together,” he said.
Finding a Way For Everyone to Connect with Warhol
In his time as an arts educator at the Warhol, he especially enjoyed seeing what resonated with visitors at the museum, as there was something everyone could find to connect them to Warhol’s life and work. “There might be people who weren’t quite ready to embrace Warhol’s work, and you’d see them just melt. There’d be some part of him that would really resonate with folks—growing up in a steel town in a working-class family, his career in advertising, or just something like that he went to church a lot with his mom…”
As for what most resonated with Rossero personally about Warhol, true to his process-oriented, listening-focused spirit, it was Warhol’s collaborations. “I love the call and response in Warhol’s later work where he collaborated with Jean-Michel Basquiat and Francesco Clemente,” he said. “I love that that he collaborated with his mother, Julia, too. Her beautiful curlicue script is in so much of his early works. In the archives, one of my colleagues showed me the original template of Julia’s handwriting, which was a beautiful moment.”
But what he really connects with about Warhol is Warhol’s interdisciplinary approach to making art. “[Warhol] opened my eyes to the fact that you don’t have to pick one discipline or one kind of artwork to do. He produced films and made artwork and led a magazine.” He said of both his artmaking and his work ethic: “The way I best understand things is from a 360 viewpoint.”
Looking Forward at the Museum
Rossero will be in begin his tenure at the museum on March 31. He shared that among the favorite spots he’s looking forward to visiting again are Espresso a Mano in Lawrenceville, La Feria in Shadyside, and Kaya in the Strip District. In the meantime, the Warhol will be debuting Holding Still, Holding On, a collaboration with the Carnegie Mellon School of Art’s MFA program while the school’s building is under construction—another full circle moment, given that Warhol himself attended Carnegie Mellon. Visitors can also look forward to Good Business: Andy Warhol’s Screenprints in May 2025, and perhaps get a chance to say hi to Rossero in the museum he already knows so well.
Story by Emma Riva
Photo courtesy of the Warhol: Left: Mario Rossero, Self-Portrait, 2004. Right: Mario Rossero, Self-Portrait, 2019.
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