On January 1, Chicago native Tom Sokolowski will pack up his candy-colored spectacles and leave his post as director of the Andy Warhol Museum, an institution he has helmed for the past 14 years. In 1996 Sokolowski took charge of the then two-year-old Pittsburgh museum, coming to Pennsylvania from a directorship at New York University's Grey Art Gallery & Study Center. The departure is an amicable one and a committee will be formed to find a replacement. "Sometimes, you feel you're at a point when you have time and you have a few shekels in your bank account, and you can breathe and see what (else) you want to do," Sokolowski told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.

During his tenure at the Warhol institution, Sokolowski headed the campaign to create "more than a museum," spearheading community outreach programs and performance series. He also challenged visitors with controversial exhibitions, such as the 2003 "Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America" and, in 2004, "Inconvenient Evidence: Iraqi Prisoner Photographs from Abu Ghraib." Other decisions under his leadership that ruffled conservative Pittsburghian feathers included showing Warhol's urine-based "Oxidation Paintings" as well as hiring transsexuals to serve as tour guides.

Sokolowski told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that he saw the museum as "a home for the homeless," adding that "Pittsburgh doesn’t always welcome newcomers and people who are different." This approach certainly paid off — museum attendance was at 103,298 last year and this year is already up 4,796 from 2009, according to the Post-Gazette. The 56 traveling exhibitions Sokolowski sent to countries as diverse as Turkey, South Korea, Ukraine, and New Zealand, to name a few, attracted nearly 9 million visitors.

David Hillenbrand, president of Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh, the umbrella organization that oversees the Warhol Museum, said in a statement that "Tom saw beyond what could have been the limitations of a single-artist museum and led the Warhol in many fascinating directions." While Sokolowski has determined that it is time to go, he won't be able to stay away for long. In late February he will return to the museum to help install "The Word of God," an exhibition that will showcase various contemporary artists's responses to the Bible, the Torah, and the Koran. "The show should juice people up," the roguish director promised the Post-Gazette.