James Warhola

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James Warhola
James Warhola

James Warhola (born March 16, 1955) is an American artist and illustrator.

He is the nephew of artist Andy Warhol and worked for him, for a while, at Interview Magazine. He left that job to become a science fiction illustrator, something his uncle expressed his disgust with in his Diaries.

Uncle Andy's: A Faabbbulous Visit with Andy Warhol
Uncle Andy's: A Faabbbulous Visit with Andy Warhol

As science fiction illustrator in the early eighties James Warhola was known for dense, heavily textured covers which were part of a move away from the more abstracted covers of Richard M. Powers and Jack Gaughan which had been popular ten years before. He is also a part of MAD magazine's "Usual Gang of Idiots" and illustrates articles and covers for them.

Since that time he has been illustrating children's books and in 2003 published Uncle Andy's: A Faabbbulous Visit with Andy Warhol about his famous uncle.

A native of Smock, a coal-mining region in Fayette County, Pennsylvania, near Pittsburgh, and of Rusyn origin, he is the son of Paul Warhola, Andy's oldest brother. James received a BFA degree in design from Carnegie Mellon University in 1977. From 1977-80 he studied at the Art Students League of New York with Jack Faragasso, then privately with Michael Aviano. Over the last decade, he has worked as a book illustrator for several major publishing houses, among them Warner Books and Prentice Hall.

He lives in upstate New York and serves as a consultant to the Museum of Modern Art (the Warhol Family Museum) in Medzilaborce, Slovakia (near the ancestral village of the Warhola family).