At a courthouse in Kingston, New York, a jury trial is underway to determine who will control the estate of Billy Name, an artist who lived with Andy Warhol in the 1960s and was the Factory’s in-house photographer during that time.
Name, born William George Linich, documented the art party scene at Warhol’s midtown Manhattan home and studio in thousands of black-and-white photographs. He was the person who famously covered Warhol’s loft in tin foil and silver paint, dubbing it the Silver Factory.
An article in the Times Union documents in detail the history of the conflict, which began when Name died in 2016. He had been living in Poughkeepsie, New York, where he was born, and his agent at the time of his death, Dagon James, was identified as the executor of his estate in his New York Times obituary.
According to the Times Union, two months after Name’s death, his niece Suzette Linich produced a will signed in 2011 that designated her, and not James, executor of her uncle’s estate; this new will was accepted by Ulster Surrogate Court in 2017. The following year, James produced a different will, signed by Name in 2015 in the presence of a lawyer, which designated James executor.
Suzette Linich claims that by the time this final will was signed, a year before her uncle’s death, Name had been suffering from multiple ailments. “In their affidavits, Name’s nieces and nephew stated that their uncle was incontinent and often confused. They asserted that by 2015, he lacked the mental capacity to execute a will,” reported the Times Union.
James, for his part, insists that Name was “lucid and well-groomed” and “generally fit” at the time he signed the final will in 2015. James also points to one of Name’s final interviews, published in the Guardian in September 2015. Despite being in a hospital in Poughkeepsie due to severe dehydration, Name was, according to James (who was with Name during the conversation), “alert and on point.”
On Monday, a jury in Kingston began hearing each side in order to determine who will control the rights to license and publish Name’s archive of photographs and negatives.
