It’s Andy Warhol’s birthday today, and if you’ve got a hankering to mark the occasion by supporting the arts while also bringing home original artworks or artifacts connected to the artist, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts has got you covered. 

The foundation is offering more than 400 selections from its holdings on its eBay for Charity platform in a sale starting today, with proceeds going to dozens of arts nonprofits nationwide. The initiative is called the “Philanthropy Factory,” harkening back to the Factory, the Manhattan HQ where Warhol and his associates gathered and worked.

The offerings include Polaroids, photographs, prints, printed materials, and vintage posters. Their cumulative value is nearly $1.5 million, and the funds will go to support some 74 organizations. Prices range from $250, which will get you a Warhol portrait of the famed jockey Willie Shoemaker, up to $20,000, which will score you an iconic screenprint of a cow on wallpaper.

Andy Warhol, Cow (1971). ©The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. Priced at $20,000.

“Warhol is a global artist who’s incredibly desirable and well known, and this gives people a chance to purchase with ease and with confidence since they know these items come directly from the estate,” said Michael Dayton Hermann, the foundation’s director of licensing, marketing, and sales. “The average price is about $3,500 to $4,000, so it’s a much more democratic way of engaging with the art market.” Since it started staging eBay charity sales in 2020, the foundation has raised over $4 million, selling more than 1,000 works to buyers in over 20 countries.

This time out, the grantees range from larger institutions like the Baltimore Museum of Art and New York’s MoMA PS1 to small entities far from the major art capitals, like Stove Works in Chattanooga, Tennessee, a venue for both the production and exhibition of art, and A Studio in the Woods, an artists’ residency program in New Orleans, Louisiana. The grantees get the benefit of a worldwide market for the artist, and the foundation has the logistics taken care of by Matchfire, which specializes in eBay sales; it’s too small an organization to handle the sales mechanism by itself. 

Andy Warhol, Debbie Harry and Chris Stein (1980). ©The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. Priced at $7,000.

“For decades, and through many funding programs, the Andy Warhol Foundation has provided vital funding to arts organizations across the United States,” said Jessica Morgan, director of the Dia Art Foundation, one of this year’s grantees. “This ambitious new endeavor highlights how central visual art and artists are to so many communities across the country, and how crucial the Foundation’s expanding work in supporting arts organizations is.” 

Created in 1987, the foundation works to preserve the artist’s legacy, partly by publishing catalogues raisonné of his work (it recently released the sixth volume), and to support advancement of the visual arts with its grant-making programs. Over the years, it has given away nearly $300 million to over 1,000 organizations, and gifted more than 55,000 works of art to institutions worldwide.

Dayton Hermann thinks that the innovative sale format echoes a strain of artistic thinking. “Our mission is to advance the visual arts, and just as artists challenge us, the field of philanthropy should think about innovative ways to engage with audiences,” he said.

Another grantee echoes that sentiment. 

“The Warhol foundation’s ‘Philanthropy Factory’ exemplifies innovative solutions for sustained support for our arts organizations,” said Kalaija Mallery, artistic and executive director of The Luminary, in St. Louis, Missouri. “It is an honor to be included in this nationwide initiative along with so many others in the spirit of what Warhol built to support: outside-of-the-box thinking, creative world-building, and sustainable structures advancing the visual arts.”

Dayton Hermann agrees that buying from this sale is not just shopping, but rather that it gives people the satisfaction of being a patron of the arts, at a level they can afford.

“People enjoy purchasing with purpose. I think that matters to people more than ever.”