“Andy Warhol’s America” will begin a three-part lecture series by the Columbus Museum of Art.The series will focus on the lives and work of three postwar artists: Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg and 1946 Ohio State graduate Roy Lichtenstein.”The lecture series is in conjunction with the exhibition of Claes Oldenburg and is aimed to educate people on contemporary art by examining the lives of other artists from that period,” said Paul Mollard, educator for public programs at the Columbus Museum of Art. The first lecture will be Sunday and will be led by Donna DeSalvo, curator-at-large at the Wexner Center.Mollard said that Warhol was an artist and a businessman who did well because of his ability to market his work. Mollard said that all the artists featured in the lecture series reacted in similar ways to the social events that were happening in the ’60s and ’70s.In addition to her curator duties, DeSalvo is also adjunct faculty in the Department of Art Education at Ohio State. She became interested in Warhol’s work in 1985, when she was the curator at the Dia Center for the Arts in New York City.”We chose Donna because she is the foremost local person who knows a lot about Andy Warhol,” Mollard said. “She has done research and is highly recommended as a local expert in her field.”DeSalvo said she was extremely interested in photography and was impressed by Warhol’s ability to combine photographic images with painting. She said that Warhol’s work is a way of looking at the world through the language of everyday culture.”I see Warhol’s work as distinctly American in that it embodies the twin American obsession for innovation and conformity,” DeSalvo said. “We like to be new, but we like to fit in.”DeSalvo said that Warhol is critical to pop art because he was one of the foremost pop artists.”His work has remained fresh and continues to reflect artistic preoccupations with the media, photography, popular culture and cultural concerns at the end of the century,” DeSalvo said.The presentation will focus on the ways Warhol’s work used the techniques and developments of advertising, marketing and communications, as well as ideas about mass production and the process of making art.Warhol’s “Campbell Soup Cans” (100 and single), “Gold Marilyn,” “Camouflage Self-Portrait” and “Shoes” are some of the pictures that DeSalvo will show during her presentation. DeSalvo said that she was a good candidate to lead the presentation because of her knowledge of Warhol and his work, as well as her position at the Wexner Center. “The Wexner Center is a cutting-edge place that aims to display the most inventive work in all the arts,” DeSalvo said. “Warhol is a multi-disciplinary artist which is very much at the core of the goal of the Wexner Center.”