Andy Warhol at Vanderbilt

Campbell's soup cans and Marilyn Monroe. For those who are hip to pop art and the Beat Generation, those nouns can only mean one thing: Andy Warhol. Though it's impossible to transport the gleaming silver and the aura of mystery that surrounded Warhol's Factory down to Nashville, soon Vanderbilt will add several of Warhol's pieces to its permanent collection.



As the university's Fine Arts Gallery director Joseph Mella stated, "a major thing" has happened. Although the iconic soup cans and Marilyn Monroe portrait will not make an appearance on campus, 150 of Warhol's Polaroids, photographs and prints will.



The Fine Arts Gallery is the beneficiary of the Andy Warhol Photographic Legacy Program's campaign to make the artist's works more accessible to the public. The Legacy Program's goal is to fulfill Warhol's dream of creating a foundation intended for the "advancement of the visual arts." Vanderbilt was invited to apply for the foundation's gift then selected as a recipient, along with 183 other college and university galleries across the United States.

Learn about Andy Warhol at Vanderbilt.

Hit the road like Jack: Retracing Kerouac's Novel on its 50th Anniversary

For wannabe hipsters of long ago, Jack Kerouac's novel On the Road gave permission to swipe a knapsack and hitchhike across the country in search of jumpin' jazz joints, pliant bohemian chicks and The Meaning of Life. Today's young readers perhaps dream of strangling their American lit prof with an iPod cord. Such is the litmus-test nature of this book, which was published 50 years ago and still reportedly sells 100,000 copies a year.

Kerouac's semi-autobiographical, stream-of-consciousness prose, spontaneously written during a three-week binge, is said to have energized the Beat Generation subculture and laid intellectual groundwork for the social upheavals of the '60s. The work is less a travelogue than a pulsating tale of searchers living on the edge, but it inspired a passion for carefree, bare-bones travel. And it rose to popularity just as the interstate highway system (and before The Texas Chain Saw Massacre) came into being.

USA TODAY's Jerry Shriver reread the book during a 1,727-mile journey trip through America's midsection. His goals: to See What's Out There and give armchair Kerouac fans an update on the state of roadside culture. (Owing to his middle age and hopeless entrenchment in the establishment, pliant bohemian chicks were off-limits.)

Read the entire article in the USA Today