Patrick Moore, who served as the executive director of the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh from 2017 until last month, has been named the director and culture lead of the Panarae Partnership Limited, a private equity and advisory firm that operates between the United Kingdom and the Middle East-North Africa region. He will act as the main point of interface between Panarae’s business side and its cultural investments, including advising on the forthcoming London edition of South by Southwest (SXSW), the celebrated festival of music, film, culture and technology originated in Austin, Texas.
SXSW London will debut in early June 2025, with events and activations to be staged across a number of venues in the Shoreditch neighbourhood of East London. It is being designed to focus more of its programming on the arts than the Austin festival, a shift that Moore tells The Art Newspaper he played a role in precipitating. While noting that SXSW “has an interest in the arts in general in Austin in terms of film and music”, he says it is “almost impossible to think about English culture [differentiating] between music, the visual arts and fashion”. For the new event to be “reflective of London”, he adds, it is imperative to entwine all three media into its programme.
The distinction between the festivals goes beyond the programmatic. The international editions of SXSW—a Sydney iteration of the festival premiered in 2023 and returns later this year (14-20 October)—are presented by independently operating entities that have each licensed the name and rights from the Austin-based flagship organisation, which retains control over the SXSW brand and strictly provides technical assistance to the licensees. This means Moore has “no role with the other SXSW festivals around the world”, nor is he the director of SXSW London. “I’m an adviser, especially around the visual arts,” he says.
Aiding Moore in shaping the event is another institutional heavyweight: Alex Poots, who will act as a creative adviser while maintaining his full-time role as the artistic director of The Shed in New York. The festival’s growing team also includes Adem Holness, the former head of contemporary music at the Southbank Centre, and Katy Arnander, a former director of content and programming at the Ambassador Theatre Group and Sadler’s Wells, among other London institutions.
“I’ve always admired what The Shed does, in particular some of the projects that Alex has done there,” says Moore. He cites Poots’s involvement in shepherding Frieze New York to the venue, as well as Reich Richter Pärt, the 2019 collaboration between Gerhard Richter and the contemporary composers Steve Reich and Arvo Pärt that paired sprawling video projections of Richter’s paintings with new music. Moore says the latter project’s merger of art, music and technology shows that Poots “could really help us think about three, four or five projects that we could do in London that could really be fascinating”.
Moore says it is still too early in his tenure to know how much of his mandate SXSW London will ultimately comprise at Panarae. The firm’s other investments in the entertainment and media sectors so far include the Penske Media Corporation—the publisher of Artforum and Artnews, as well as Rolling Stone, Billboard and Variety—and Tait, a major supplier of stage sets and related equipment for concerts and other touring events.
A complex legacy
Moore’s legacy at the Warhol Museum is a complex one. Under his leadership, the institution expanded its exhibition programmes to other major cities both inside and outside the US, including projects in Dubai, Beijing and, most controversially, Saudi Arabia. (Moore defended the latter in an opinion piece for Artnet.) Also drawing fire during his tenure was the plan for the Pop District, a ten-year, $80m initiative that aims to infuse several blocks surrounding the museum’s home in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with public art, a performance venue and a “creative-economy workforce development” programme for local youth.
Rumours swirled in Pittsburgh media and the art media this March, when Moore’s departure from the Warhol Museum was announced, that he had been pressured into an early exit due to internal backlash over some of his projects, particularly the Pop District. In response, Steven Knapp, the president and chief executive of the Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh (which operates the Warhol Museum and several other institutions in the city), published a letter in Artnews saying he could “assert without qualification” that the gossip was untrue, and that his organisation “stands behind Patrick’s vision for the Pop District as well as his seven-year leadership of The Warhol overall”.
Now at Panarae, Moore dismisses any notion that his decision to move on from the Warhol Museum came from feeling he had reached the limit of his vision either there or within the institutional sector. On the contrary, he says he was so inspired by his final exhibition, KAWS + Warhol, that he considered staying on. “But on a really personal level, I’d been thinking for a long time that my husband and I wanted our lives to be in Spain, and I wanted to do that at a point where I was still young and strong and could adapt to a move like that,” he says.
The opportunity at Panarae fulfilled that goal, thanks to the ease of commuting between Spain, London and elsewhere in Europe as necessary. He adds that it also had a deeper logic to it: “I’d been thinking maybe it makes sense because I’d been soaking in Andy Warhol for over a decade, to continue my role in culture but also to consider a more business-oriented role”. It also returns him to the for-profit sector; prior to joining the museum, Moore owned and operated a Los Angeles-based digital production studio that created content for such clients as Yahoo!.
Asked whether he felt anything had been left unsaid in his previous public comments about either his departure from the Warhol Museum or the divisive conversations around some of its projects, he points only to the reception of the Pop District’s workforce development programme. “I was always surprised that people were surprised that a museum would be involved in that activity. All museums now have to be explicit about the benefit they bring to their community,” he says. “If I can give a young person, especially a young person who’s not coming from a privileged background, an opportunity to learn skills and to benefit from Warhol’s legacy, why wouldn’t I want to do that? Why wouldn’t I want the museum to be at the centre of that?”
He adds: “It’s an interesting time to be an American, an interesting time to think about what the past five years have yielded in terms of the responsibilities of non-profits to respond to their community, and what a person can do that’s tangible rather than performative. What I’m really proud of is that more than 600 young people thus far have a better shot at getting a job than they did before. For me, that’s a tangible result that anybody should be proud of.”
Moore will now try to make Panarae’s next big cultural project another reason to take pride. With “a great many” of the venues for SXSW London already reserved, he says the next major component of organising the festival will be to put a full programming staff in place. Although he stresses that he will not be curating the festival himself, he also intends to spend a healthy part of his summer researching the local talent that aligns with the SXSW ethos. “I’m bringing myself up to speed on: Who are these incredible young London-based artists who are not only interested in the visual arts but also in music and technology? Who can we shine a light on?”
