Thirteen Most Wanted Men

Thirteen Most Wanted Men was a mural made by Andy Warhol in 1964 for the facade of the New York State Pavilion at the 1964 World's Fair in Queens, using enlarged silkscreened mugshots of thirteen men drawn from a New York City Police Department booklet of wanted suspects, each shown in front and side profile. The twenty-by-twenty-foot mural was Warhol's only public mural and was painted over within days of its installation, before the fair even opened, after officials grew concerned that the images, most of them of men of Italian descent, might offend voters. The rapid censorship of the piece made it a lasting reference point in arguments over artistic freedom and government control of public art. After the mural's destruction, Warhol reused the same mugshot imagery to make a series of twenty smaller silkscreen paintings, which were exhibited internationally in 1967 and 1968. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/