“My favorite exhibit of all time is the cloud room at the Andy Warhol Museum. In college, because we had free admission, if I needed to feel grounded I would go and lay on the floor in there for hours. It’s peaceful and so beautiful in its simplicity.”
Did you know in the summer of 1964 Andy Warhol wanted to make a floating light bulb? One of his collaborators, Billy Klüver, did some tests with helium, then found a material made by 3M called Scotchpak. It was highly impermeable to helium and could be heat-sealed easily. After telling Warhol he could not make the light bulb, Klüver showed him the material. Warhol said, “Let’s make clouds”, then he simply folded the material over and heat-sealed it on three sides and filled it with helium. Warhol’s “clouds” were born.
