Title: “Sundae Morning”

Our Warhol Fire Hydrant design, part of the City of Wheaton’s Wheaton Warhol: Pop Art Fire Hydrants Project, is based off of the banana art that Andy Warhol had done for the cover of the Velvet Underground album. The banana, in the original piece, was interactive. People could peel back the banana, and they would be surprised to see it in vibrant pink. We’ve used that as a jumping-off point for our fire hydrant.

Imagine if someone had taken an empty banana peel and set it on top of the hydrant, with the peels draping down over it, down to the ground. That’s what we visualized. The challenge was to work with the shape of the hydrant, turning and manipulating the peel to work in 3D, in and around the fire hydrant’s iconic parts. The shocking pink “base” of the hydrant recalls what would have been the banana in the original piece. The very top part of the hydrant is painted dark, representing the banana’s bottom nub. We have indicated the banana’s stem at the base, near the street. Warhol’s style of solid/silk-screen-like outlines and shading in stark black are used to make the whole piece “pop.”

For details about this project, see our page about Wheaton Warhol.