The Andy Warhol Museum

Flyer for Tearoom Screening

The Andy Warhol Museum Tearoom Flyer (back)

Privacy Rights, Surveillance Issues, Police Entrapment, and Societal Sexual Repression

All of this on a Friday night at the Warhol.

Film curators at the Andy Warhol Museum put together an evening program with these controversial topics as the theme of the night. Filmmaker William E. Jones presented 56 minutes of found police surveillance footage that featured men engaging in public sex in a restroom in Mansfield, Ohio in 1962. The program also included a panel discussion on the issues raised by the footage, which was collected without the knowledge of its participants and led to jail terms for many who were charged with sodomy.

Our Work

You can probably imagine what was going through our minds when we were given this brief. A fantastic program, no doubt, but what would the flyer look like? Would we use images, and what of?

We were fortunate to have access to a small collection of stills from the police surveillance film, and a few of those were, um, suitable to distribute. The feature still we selected pictured a man in the restroom looking, though unknowingly, in the direction of the hidden police camera. While it was a low resolution image, the grainy look conjures up just the right feel for the themes the flyer promoted.