April 28, 2005 Kelly Cresap To Discuss His Book on Andy Warhol May 17

Kelly Cresap, who teaches in the professional writing program at the University of Maryland, will discuss his book “Pop Trickster Fool: Warhol Performs Naiveté” at 12:30 p.m. on Tuesday, May 17, in Dining Room A on the sixth floor of the Library’s Madison Building, 101 Independence Ave. S.E., Washington, D.C.

A book signing will follow the discussion. The program is free and open to the public; no tickets or reservations are needed.

The Library’s Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division, which assisted Cresap with his research, is cosponsoring the event with the Center for the Book. The author also drew on the resources of the Prints and Photographs and Music Divisions.

“Pop Trickster Fool” (University of Illinois Press, 2004) examines the implications of pop artist Andy Warhol’s life-long penchant for playing the fool. Cresap points out how Warhol, by habitually adopting the guise of a fool in public, obscured his intentions as both a pop artist and a filmmaker. By making his own apparent lack of competence and intelligence into an elaborate ruse, he became a figure without whose self-conscious naiveté has had a revolutionary impact.

The book blends art, literature, popular culture and mythology. Jennifer Doyle of the University of California at Riverside called it “an adventuresome and refreshing look at the performance aspect of the artist’s persona—a great reminder of how much fun it is to write and to think about Andy Warhol.”

Cresap earned a doctorate in English from the University of Virginia in 1998. As director of first-year writing there, he assisted in leading a university-wide renovation of the writing program. Prior to joining the University of Maryland in August 2003, he taught world drama, postmodernism and rhetoric at the University of Tennessee.

The Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound Division was created in 1978 to centralize the collection, preservation and access to the Library’s unparalleled audio-visual collections.

Established in 1977 as a public-private partnership, the Center for the Book uses the resources of the Library of Congress to stimulate public interest in books, reading and libraries. For information about its activities and those of its state affiliates and more than 80 national reading promotion partners, visit its Web site: www.loc.gov/cfbook.