This is from a letter in the early 2000s
Friday afternoon we drove to Medzilaborce on the border with Poland and the Ukraine. Medzilaborce is the ancestral home of the Warhol family (as in pop artist Andy.) It’s easy to identify the town when driving through because of two huge Campbell’s Soup Cans that sit in front of the “Dom Kultura.” The Andy Warhol Foundation donated 14 works to the town, including “Red Lenin” and the town has set up the Warhol Museum of Modern Art. Warhol is probably one of the two best-known Slovak Americans. The other is Jesse Ventura. Ventura could have been a Warhol creation. The town has erected a statue of Andy holding an umbrella skeleton with water dripping from the ends. The museum and statue are next to a huge church that has erected a life-sized crucifix. When you approach the museum from parking in front of the “Pension Andy” your first glimpse of the Warhol statue is under the right armpit of Christ Crucified.
The museum is open limited hours and they turned out not to include the “fifteen minutes” we were in town. The Pension Andy displays prints of the original works displayed in the museum, and some think the pension displays the prints better than the originals across the street. A reporter once asked Worhol where he was from. He said “I’m from nowhere.” “Nowhere” — Medzilaborce, now has had its 15 minutes of fame.
