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Whitney Museum

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Whitney Museum of American Art
Whitney Museum Logo.jpg
Whitney Museum of American Art (49051573133).jpg
The front of the museum (2019)
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Established1930 (1930)
Location99 Gansevoort Street, Lower Manhattan, New York City
Coordinates40°44′22.6″N 74°0′32.0″W / 40.739611°N 74.008889°W / 40.739611; -74.008889Coordinates: 40°44′22.6″N 74°0′32.0″W / 40.739611°N 74.008889°W / 40.739611; -74.008889
TypeArt museum
Visitors1,151,080 (2016)[1]
FounderGertrude Vanderbilt Whitney
DirectorAdam D. Weinberg
ArchitectRenzo Piano
Public transit accessSubway: "A" train"C" train"E" train"L" train at 14th Street – Eighth Avenue
Bus: M11, M12, M14A, M14D
Websitewhitney.org

The Whitney Museum of American Art, known informally as "The Whitney", is an art museum in the Meatpacking District and West Village neighborhoods of Manhattan in New York City. It was founded in 1930 by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (1875–1942), a wealthy and prominent American socialite, sculptor, and art patron after whom it is named.

The Whitney focuses on 20th- and 21st-century American art. Its permanent collection, spanning the late-19th century to the present, comprises more than 25,000 paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, photographs, films, videos, and artifacts of new media by more than 3,500 artists. It places particular emphasis on exhibiting the work of living artists as well as maintaining an extensive permanent collection of important pieces from the first half of the last century. The museum's Annual and Biennial exhibitions have long been a venue for younger and lesser-known artists whose work is showcased there.

From 1966 to 2014, the Whitney was at 945 Madison Avenue on Manhattan's Upper East Side in a building designed by Marcel Breuer and Hamilton P. Smith. The museum closed in October 2014 to relocate to its current building, which was designed by Renzo Piano at 99 Gansevoort Street and opened on May 1, 2015.

Discover more about Whitney Museum related topics

Art museum

Art museum

An art museum or art gallery is a building or space for the display of art, usually from the museum's own collection. It might be in public or private ownership and may be accessible to all or have restrictions in place. Although primarily concerned with visual art, art museums are often used as a venue for other cultural exchanges and artistic activities, such as lectures, performance arts, music concerts, or poetry readings. Art museums also frequently host themed temporary exhibitions, which often include items on loan from other collections.

Meatpacking District, Manhattan

Meatpacking District, Manhattan

The Meatpacking District is a neighborhood in the New York City borough of Manhattan that runs from West 14th Street south to Gansevoort Street, and from the Hudson River east to Hudson Street. The Meatpacking Business Improvement District along with signage in the area, extend these borders farther north to West 17th Street, east to Eighth Avenue, and south to Horatio Street.

West Village

West Village

The West Village is a neighborhood in the western section of the larger Greenwich Village neighborhood of Lower Manhattan, New York City.

Manhattan

Manhattan

Manhattan is the most densely populated and geographically smallest of the five boroughs of New York City. The borough is also coextensive with New York County, one of the original counties of the U.S. state of New York. Located near the southern tip of New York State, Manhattan is based in the Eastern Time Zone and constitutes both the geographical and demographic center of the Northeast megalopolis and the urban core of the New York metropolitan area, the largest metropolitan area in the world by urban landmass. Over 58 million people live within 250 miles of Manhattan, which serves as New York City’s economic and administrative center, cultural identifier, and the city’s historical birthplace. Residents of the outer boroughs of New York City often refer to Manhattan as "the city". Manhattan has been described as the cultural, financial, media, and entertainment capital of the world, and hosts the United Nations headquarters. Manhattan also serves as the headquarters of the global art market, with numerous art galleries and auction houses collectively hosting half of the world’s art auctions.

New York City

New York City

New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over 300.46 square miles (778.2 km2), New York City is the most densely populated major city in the United States and more than twice as populous as Los Angeles, the nation's second-largest city. New York City is located at the southern tip of New York State. It constitutes the geographical and demographic center of both the Northeast megalopolis and the New York metropolitan area, the largest metropolitan area in the U.S. by both population and urban area. With over 20.1 million people in its metropolitan statistical area and 23.5 million in its combined statistical area as of 2020, New York is one of the world's most populous megacities, and over 58 million people live within 250 mi (400 km) of the city. New York City is a global cultural, financial, entertainment, and media center with a significant influence on commerce, health care and life sciences, research, technology, education, politics, tourism, dining, art, fashion, and sports. Home to the headquarters of the United Nations, New York is an important center for international diplomacy, and is sometimes described as the capital of the world.

Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney

Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney

Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney was an American sculptor, art patron and collector, and founder in 1931 of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. She was a prominent social figure and hostess, who was born into the wealthy Vanderbilt family and married into the Whitney family.

New media

New media

New media is described as communication technologies that enable or enhance interaction between users as well as interaction between users and content. In the middle of the 1990s, the phrase "new media" became widely used as part of a sales pitch for the influx of interactive CD-ROMs for entertainment and education. The new media technologies, sometimes known as Web 2.0, include a wide range of web-related communication tools such as blogs, wikis, online social networking, virtual worlds, and other social media platforms.

Whitney Biennial

Whitney Biennial

The Whitney Biennial is a biennial exhibition of contemporary American art, typically by young and lesser known artists, on display at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, United States. The event began as an annual exhibition in 1932; the first biennial was in 1973. The Whitney show is generally regarded as one of the leading shows in the art world, often setting or leading trends in contemporary art. It helped bring artists like Georgia O'Keeffe, Jackson Pollock, and Jeff Koons to prominence.

945 Madison Avenue

945 Madison Avenue

945 Madison Avenue, also known as the Breuer Building, is a museum building in the Upper East Side of Manhattan, New York City. The Marcel Breuer-designed structure was built from 1964 to 1966 as the third home for the Whitney Museum of American Art. The Whitney moved out in 2014, after nearly 50 years in the building. In 2016, it was leased to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and became the Met Breuer, which closed in 2020. The building currently houses the Frick Madison, the temporary home of the Frick Collection set for a two-year period that began in March 2021. There are no public plans for the building after the Met's lease expires in 2023.

Upper East Side

Upper East Side

The Upper East Side, sometimes abbreviated UES, is a neighborhood in the borough of Manhattan in New York City, bounded by 96th Street to the north, the East River to the east, 59th Street to the south, and Central Park and Fifth Avenue to the west. The area incorporates several smaller neighborhoods, including Lenox Hill, Carnegie Hill, and Yorkville. Once known as the Silk Stocking District, it has long been the most affluent neighborhood in New York City.

Marcel Breuer

Marcel Breuer

Marcel Lajos Breuer, was a Hungarian American modernist architect and furniture designer. He moved to the United States in 1937 and became a naturalized American citizen in 1944.

Renzo Piano

Renzo Piano

Renzo Piano is an Italian architect. His notable buildings include the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, The Shard in London (2012), the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City (2015), İstanbul Modern in Istanbul (2022) and Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center in Athens (2016). He won the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1998.

History

Early years

Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, the museum's namesake and founder, was a well-regarded sculptor and serious art collector. As a patron of the arts, she began acquiring art in 1905, and had already achieved some success with the Whitney Studio and Whitney Studio Club, New York–based exhibition spaces she operated from 1914 to 1928 to promote the works of avant garde and unrecognized American artists. Whitney favored the radical art of the American artists of the Ashcan School such as John French Sloan, George Luks, and Everett Shinn, as well as others such as Edward Hopper, Stuart Davis, Charles Demuth, Charles Sheeler, and Max Weber.[2][3]

With the aid of her assistant, Juliana R. Force, Whitney collected nearly 700 works of American art. In 1929, she offered to donate over 500 to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but the museum declined the gift. This, along with the apparent preference for European modernism at the recently opened Museum of Modern Art, led Whitney to start her own museum, exclusively for American art, in 1929.[4][5]

Whitney Library archives from 1928 reveal that during this time, the Studio Club used the gallery space of Wilhelmina Weber Furlong of the Art Students League to exhibit traveling shows featuring modernist work.[6][7] The Whitney Museum of American Art was founded in 1930;[8] at this time architect Noel L. Miller was converting three row houses on West 8th Street in Greenwich Village—one of which, 8 West 8th Street had been the location of the Studio Club—to be the museum's home, as well as a residence for Whitney.[9] The new museum opened in 1931. Force became the museum's first director, and under her guidance, it concentrated on displaying the works of new and contemporary American artists.[10]

In 1954, the museum left its original location[9] and moved to a small structure on 54th Street connected to and behind the Museum of Modern Art on 53rd Street. On April 15, 1958, a fire on MOMA's second floor that killed one person forced the evacuation of paintings and staff on MOMA's upper floors to the Whitney. Among the paintings evacuated was A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, which was on loan from the Art Institute of Chicago.[11]

Move to the Upper East Side

The Whitney Museum of American Art's former (1966–2014) home on Madison Avenue; the Marcel Breuer-designed building has seen numerous subsequent uses.
The Whitney Museum of American Art's former (1966–2014) home on Madison Avenue; the Marcel Breuer-designed building has seen numerous subsequent uses.

In 1961, the Whitney began seeking a site for a larger building. In 1966, it settled at the southeast corner of Madison Avenue and 75th Street on Manhattan's Upper East Side.[12] The building, planned and built 1963–1966 by Marcel Breuer and Hamilton P. Smith in a distinctively modern style, is easily distinguished from the neighboring townhouses by its staircase façade made of granite stones and its trapezoidal windows. In 1967, Mauricio Lasansky showed "The Nazi Drawings". The exhibition traveled to the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, where it appeared with shows by Louise Nevelson and Andrew Wyeth as the first exhibits in the new museum.

The institution grappled with space problems for decades.[13] In 1967, the museum opened a satellite space called the Art Resources Center (ARC). Originally intended to be located in the South Bronx, the ARC opened on Cherry Street on the Lower East Side.[14] From 1973 to 1983, the Whitney operated a branch at 55 Water Street, a building owned by Harold Uris, who gave the museum a lease for $1 a year. In 1983, Philip Morris International installed a Whitney branch in the lobby of its Park Avenue headquarters. In 1981, the museum opened an exhibition space in Stamford, Connecticut, housed at Champion International.[15] In the late 1980s, the Whitney entered into arrangements with Park Tower Realty, IBM, and the Equitable Life Assurance Society of the United States, setting up satellite museums with rotating exhibitions in their buildings' lobbies.[16] Each museum had its own director, with all plans approved by a Whitney committee.[15]

The institution attempted to expand its landmark building in 1978, commissioning UK architects Derek Walker and Norman Foster to design a tall tower alongside it, the first of several proposals from leading architects, but each time, the effort was abandoned, because of the cost, the design, or both.[13] To secure additional space for the museum's collections, then-director Thomas N. Armstrong III developed plans for a 10-story, $37.5 million addition to the main building. The proposed addition, designed by Michael Graves and announced in 1985, drew immediate opposition. Graves had proposed demolishing the flanking brownstones down to the East 74th Street corner for a complementary addition. The project gradually lost the support of the museum's trustees, and the plans were dropped in 1989.[17] Between 1995 and 1998, the building underwent a renovation and expansion by Richard Gluckman. In 2001, Rem Koolhaas was commissioned to submit two designs for a $200 million expansion. Those plans were dropped in 2003,[18] causing director Maxwell L. Anderson to resign.[19] New York restaurateur Danny Meyer opened Untitled, a restaurant in the museum, in March 2011. The space was designed by the Rockwell Group.[20]

Move downtown

Entrance to the Whitney via the High Line
Entrance to the Whitney via the High Line
The Whitney Museum, New York City in 2016: The building was designed by Renzo Piano.
The Whitney Museum, New York City in 2016: The building was designed by Renzo Piano.

The Whitney developed a new main building, designed by Renzo Piano, in the West Village and Meatpacking District in lower Manhattan. The new museum, at the intersection of Gansevoort and Washington Streets, was built on a previously city-owned site and marks the southern entrance to the High Line park.[13] Construction began in 2010 and was completed in 2015.[12] It cost $422 million.[21] Robert Silman Associates was the structural engineer; Jaros, Baum & Bolles provided MEP services; Ove Arup & Partners was the lighting/daylighting engineer; and Turner Construction LLC served as construction manager.[22]

The new structure spans 200,000 square feet (19,000 m2) and eight stories that include the city's largest column-free art gallery spaces, an education center, theater, a conservation laboratory, and a library and reading rooms. Two of the floors are fully devoted to the museum's permanent collection.[23] The only permanent artwork commissioned for the site—its four main elevators—were conceived by Richard Artschwager.[24] The new building's collection comprises over 600 works by over 400 artists.[25] Observation decks on the floors five through eight are linked by an outdoor staircase.

The new building is much more expansive and open than the old ones.[26] As one New York Times review described the building:

The Whitney ... has a series of events spaces at its margins: a flexible auditorium and four large terraces, three of which are linked by an outdoor staircase. ... It has timed tickets that are designed to control crowding, but people may linger longer than expected. After art they can retire to the eighth-floor cafe, the terraces or the lines of comfy leather couches facing glass walls overlooking the Hudson and Greenwich Village at either end of the fifth floor.[25]

The museum needed to raise $760 million for the building and its endowment. In May 2011, the Metropolitan Museum of Art announced it had entered into an agreement to occupy the Madison Avenue building for at least eight years starting in 2015, easing the Whitney's burden of having to finance two large museum spaces.[27] The occupation of the old space was later postponed to 2016.[28]

After an April 30, 2015, ceremonial ribbon-cutting attended by Michelle Obama and Bill de Blasio,[25] the new building opened on May 1, 2015.[29]

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MacDougal Street

MacDougal Street

MacDougal Street is a one-way street in the Greenwich Village and SoHo neighborhoods of Manhattan, New York City. The street is bounded on the south by Prince Street and on the north by West 8th Street; its numbering begins in the south. Between Waverly Place and West 3rd Street it carries the name Washington Square West and the numbering scheme changes, running north to south, beginning with #29 Washington Square West at Waverly Place and ending at #37 at West 3rd Street. Traffic on the street runs southbound (downtown).

Greenwich Village

Greenwich Village

Greenwich Village, or simply The Village, is a neighborhood on the west side of Lower Manhattan in New York City, bounded by 14th Street to the north, Broadway to the east, Houston Street to the south, and the Hudson River to the west. Greenwich Village also contains several subsections, including the West Village west of Seventh Avenue and the Meatpacking District in the northwest corner of Greenwich Village.

Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney

Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney

Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney was an American sculptor, art patron and collector, and founder in 1931 of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. She was a prominent social figure and hostess, who was born into the wealthy Vanderbilt family and married into the Whitney family.

Ashcan School

Ashcan School

The Ashcan School, also called the Ash Can School, was an artistic movement in the United States during the late 19th-early 20th century that produced works portraying scenes of daily life in New York, often in the city's poorer neighborhoods.

George Luks

George Luks

George Benjamin Luks was an American artist, identified with the aggressively realistic Ashcan School of American painting.

Everett Shinn

Everett Shinn

Everett Shinn was an American painter and member of the urban realist Ashcan School.

Edward Hopper

Edward Hopper

Edward Hopper was an American realist painter and printmaker. While he is widely known for his oil paintings, he was equally proficient as a watercolorist and printmaker in etching.

Charles Demuth

Charles Demuth

Charles Henry Buckius Demuth was an American painter who specialized in watercolors and turned to oils late in his career, developing a style of painting known as Precisionism.

Charles Sheeler

Charles Sheeler

Charles Sheeler was an American artist known for his Precisionist paintings, commercial photography, and the avant-garde film, Manhatta, which he made in collaboration with Paul Strand. Sheeler is recognized as one of the early adopters of modernism in American art.

Max Weber (artist)

Max Weber (artist)

Max Weber was a Jewish-American painter and one of the first American Cubist painters who, in later life, turned to more figurative Jewish themes in his art. He is best known today for Chinese Restaurant (1915), in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, "the finest canvas of his Cubist phase," in the words of art historian Avis Berman.

Juliana R. Force

Juliana R. Force

Metropolitan Museum of Art

Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, colloquially "the Met", is the largest art museum in the Americas. In 2022 it welcomed 3,208,832 visitors, ranking it eighth in the list of Most visited art museums in the world, and the second-most visited art museum in the United States. Its permanent collection contains over two million works, divided among 17 curatorial departments. The main building at 1000 Fifth Avenue, along the Museum Mile on the eastern edge of Central Park on Manhattan's Upper East Side, is by area one of the world's largest art museums. The first portion of the approximately 2-million-square-foot (190,000 m2) building was built in 1880. A much smaller second location, The Cloisters at Fort Tryon Park in Upper Manhattan, contains an extensive collection of art, architecture, and artifacts from medieval Europe.

Collection

Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney by Robert Henri (1916)
Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney by Robert Henri (1916)

The museum displays paintings, drawings, prints, sculptures, installation art, video, and photography.

The original 600 works in the permanent collection grew to about 1,300 with the opening of the second building in 1954. This number grew to around 2,000 following its move to the Breuer building on Madison Avenue in 1966. It began collecting photography in 1991. Today, spanning the late 19th century to the present, the collection contains more than 25,000 artworks by upwards of 3,500 artists.[30] Artists represented include Josef Albers, Joe Andoe, Edmund Archer, Donald Baechler, Thomas Hart Benton, Lucile Blanch, Jonathan Borofsky, Louise Bourgeois, Sonia Gordon Brown, Charles Burchfield, Alexander Calder, Suzanne Caporael, Norman Carton, Carolina Caycedo, Ching Ho Cheng, Talia Chetrit, Ann Craven, Anna Craycroft, Dan Christensen, Greg Colson, Susan Crocker, Ronald Davis, Stuart Davis, Mira Dancy, Lindsey Decker, Martha Diamond, Richard Diebenkorn, Daniella Dooling, Arthur Dove, Loretta Dunkelman, William Eggleston, Helen Frankenthaler, Georgia O'Keeffe, Arshile Gorky, Keith Haring, Grace Hartigan, Marsden Hartley, Robert Henri, Carmen Herrera, Eva Hesse, Hans Hofmann, Edward Hopper, Richard Hunt, Jasper Johns, Corita Kent, Franz Kline, Terence Koh, Willem de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Ronnie Landfield, John Marin, Knox Martin, John McCracken, John McLaughlin, Robert Motherwell, Bruce Nauman, Louise Nevelson, Barnett Newman, Kenneth Noland, Paul Pfeiffer, Jackson Pollock, Larry Poons, Maurice Prendergast, Kenneth Price, Robert Rauschenberg, Man Ray, Mark Rothko, Morgan Russell, Albert Pinkham Ryder, Cindy Sherman, John Sloan, Frank Stella, Andy Warhol, and hundreds of others.

Every two years, the museum hosts the Whitney Biennial, an international art show which displays many lesser-known artists new to the American art scene. It has displayed works by many notable artists, and has featured unconventional works, such as a 1976 exhibit of live body builders, featuring Arnold Schwarzenegger.[31]

In addition to its traditional collection, the Whitney has a website, Artport, that features "Net Art" that changes regularly. The Whitney will not sell any work by a living artist because it could damage that artist's career, but it will trade a living artist's work for another piece by the same artist.[32]

Gallery

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Painting

Painting

Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a solid surface. The medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush, but other implements, such as knives, sponges, and airbrushes, can be used.

Drawing

Drawing

Drawing is a form of visual art in which an artist uses instruments to mark paper or other two-dimensional surface. Drawing instruments include graphite pencils, pen and ink, various kinds of paints, inked brushes, colored pencils, crayons, charcoal, chalk, pastels, erasers, markers, styluses, and metals. Digital drawing is the act of drawing on graphics software in a computer. Common methods of digital drawing include a stylus or finger on a touchscreen device, stylus- or finger-to-touchpad, or in some cases, a mouse. There are many digital art programs and devices.

Installation art

Installation art

Installation art is an artistic genre of three-dimensional works that are often site-specific and designed to transform the perception of a space. Generally, the term is applied to interior spaces, whereas exterior interventions are often called public art, land art or art intervention; however, the boundaries between these terms overlap.

Josef Albers

Josef Albers

Josef Albers was a German-born artist and educator. The first living artist to be given a solo show at MoMA and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, he taught at the Bauhaus and Black Mountain College, headed Yale University's department of design, and is considered one of the most influential teachers of the visual arts in the twentieth century.

Joe Andoe

Joe Andoe

Joe Andoe is an American artist, painter, and author. His works have been featured in exhibits internationally and also numerous museums including the Denver Art Museum, the Detroit Institute of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. He is the author of the book Jubilee City: A Memoir at Full Speed (P.S.), which is a memoir about his life.

Edmund Archer (artist)

Edmund Archer (artist)

Edmund Archer (1904–1986) was an American artist best known for his portraits of African Americans. He was born in Richmond, Virginia, to parents who were both culturally and socially prominent in that city. Having taken an early interest in painting, he took art classes continually from childhood into his adult years. His long career included periods spent in Richmond, Paris, New York, and Washington, D.C. In addition to painting, he served as an assistant curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art and an instructor at the Corcoran School of Art. His portrait style tended toward a poster-like flatness early in his career and later toward a more traditional modeled style. He painted with a high degree of realism throughout his career and rarely experimented with any degree of abstraction. Galleries and museums gave him frequent exhibitions and both individual and institutional collectors provided him with income from sales. In 1938, a critic said he was then considered to be "one of the best of the young artists in the United States". A few months later, another critic credited his success to hard work: "Edmund Minor Archer has had advantages. His success story is no Horatio Alger tale. It is a story of an earnest and deeply talented artist who has worked and studied in humility and devotion, and has early reached the top, hard step by hard step".

Donald Baechler

Donald Baechler

Donald Baechler was an American painter and sculptor associated with 1980s Neo-expressionism. He had lived in Manhattan and Stephentown, New York.

Lucile Blanch

Lucile Blanch

Lucile Esma Lundquist Blanch was an American artist, art educator, and Guggenheim Fellow. She was noted for the murals she created for the U.S. Treasury Department's Section of Fine Arts during the Great Depression.

Jonathan Borofsky

Jonathan Borofsky

Jonathan Borofsky is an American sculptor and printmaker who lives and works in Ogunquit, Maine.

Louise Bourgeois

Louise Bourgeois

Louise Joséphine Bourgeois was a French-American artist. Although she is best known for her large-scale sculpture and installation art, Bourgeois was also a prolific painter and printmaker. She explored a variety of themes over the course of her long career including domesticity and the family, sexuality and the body, as well as death and the unconscious. These themes connect to events from her childhood which she considered to be a therapeutic process. Although Bourgeois exhibited with the Abstract Expressionists and her work has much in common with Surrealism and Feminist art, she was not formally affiliated with a particular artistic movement.

Alexander Calder

Alexander Calder

Alexander Calder was an American sculptor known both for his innovative mobiles that embrace chance in their aesthetic, his static "stabiles", and his monumental public sculptures. Calder preferred not to analyze his work, saying, "Theories may be all very well for the artist himself, but they shouldn't be broadcast to other people."

Norman Carton

Norman Carton

Norman Carton was an American artist and educator known for abstract expressionist art. He was born in the Ukraine region of Imperial Russia and moved to the United States in 1922 where he spent most of his adult life.

Library

The Frances Mulhall Achilles Library is a research library originally built on the collections of books and papers of founder Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, and the Whitney Museum's first director, Juliana Force. The library operates in the West Chelsea area of New York City.[33] It contains Special Collections and the Whitney Museum Archives. The archives[34] contain the Institutional Archives, Research Collections, and Manuscript Collections. The Special Collections consist of artists' books, portfolios, photographs, titles in the Whitney Fellows Artist and Writers Series (1982–2001), posters, and valuable ephemera that relate to the permanent collection. The Institutional Archives include exhibition records, photographs, curatorial research notes, artist's correspondence, audio and video recordings, and trustees' papers from 1912 to the present.

Highlights:

Books and materials in the library can be accessed in the museum's database.[33]

Independent Study Program

The Whitney Independent Study Program (ISP) was founded in 1968 by Ron Clark.[35] The Whitney ISP has helped start the careers of artists, critics, and curators including Jenny Holzer, Andrea Fraser, Julian Schnabel, Kathryn Bigelow, Roberta Smith, and Félix González-Torres, as well as many other well-known cultural producers. The program includes both art history and studio programs. Each year, the ISP selects 14 students for the Studio Program (artists), four for the Curatorial Program (curators) and six for the Critical Studies Program (researchers). It is a one-year program that includes both visiting and hired artists, art historians, and critics, and involves the reading of theory. Clark remains its director.

Notable alumni

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Jenny Holzer

Jenny Holzer

Jenny Holzer is an American neo-conceptual artist, based in Hoosick, New York. The main focus of her work is the delivery of words and ideas in public spaces and includes large-scale installations, advertising billboards, projections on buildings and other structures, and illuminated electronic displays.

Andrea Fraser

Andrea Fraser

Andrea Rose Fraser is a performance artist, mainly known for her work in the area of Institutional Critique. Fraser is based in New York and Los Angeles and is currently Department Head and Professor of Interdisciplinary Studio of the UCLA School of Arts and Architecture at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Julian Schnabel

Julian Schnabel

Julian Schnabel is an American painter and filmmaker. In the 1980s, he received international attention for his "plate paintings" — with broken ceramic plates set onto large-scale paintings. Since the 1990s, he has been a proponent of independent arthouse cinema. Schnabel directed Before Night Falls, which became Javier Bardem's breakthrough Academy Award-nominated role, and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, which was nominated for four Academy Awards. For the latter, he won the Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Director and the Golden Globe Award for Best Director, as well as receiving nominations for the Academy Award for Best Director and the César Award for Best Director.

Kathryn Bigelow

Kathryn Bigelow

Kathryn Ann Bigelow is an American filmmaker. Covering a wide range of genres, her films include Near Dark (1987), Point Break (1991), Strange Days (1995), K-19: The Widowmaker (2002), The Hurt Locker (2008), Zero Dark Thirty (2012), and Detroit (2017).

Félix González-Torres

Félix González-Torres

Félix González-Torres or Felix Gonzalez-Torres was a Cuban-born American visual artist. He lived and worked primarily in New York City between 1979 and 1995 after attending university in Puerto Rico. González-Torres’s practice incorporates a minimalist visual vocabulary and certain artworks that are composed of everyday materials such as strings of light bulbs, paired wall clocks, stacks of paper, and individually wrapped candies. González-Torres is known for having made significant contributions to the field of conceptual art in the 1980s and 1990s. His practice continues to influence and be influenced by present-day cultural discourses. González-Torres died in Miami in 1996 from AIDS-related illness.

Allora & Calzadilla

Allora & Calzadilla

Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla are a collaborative duo of visual artists who live and work in San Juan, Puerto Rico. They were the United States Representatives for the 2011 Venice Biennale, the 54th International Art Exhibition, in 2011.

Ashley Bickerton

Ashley Bickerton

Ashley Bickerton was a Barbadian-born American contemporary artist. A mixed-media artist, Bickerton often combined photographic and painterly elements with industrial and found object assemblages. He is associated with the early 1980s art movement Neo-Geo.

Mark Dion

Mark Dion

Mark Dion is an American conceptual artist best known for his use of scientific presentations in his installations. His work examines the manner in which prevalent ideologies and institutions influence our understanding of history, knowledge and the natural world. The job of the artist, according to him, is to "go against the grain of dominant culture, to challenge perception and convention". By locating the roots of environmental politics and public policy in the construction of knowledge about nature, Dion questions the objectivity and authoritative role of the scientific voice in contemporary society, tracking how pseudo-science, social agendas and ideology creep into public discourse and knowledge production. Some of his well known works include Neukom Vivarium (2006), a permanent outdoor installation and learning lab for the Olympic Sculpture Park in Seattle, Washington.

LaToya Ruby Frazier

LaToya Ruby Frazier

LaToya Ruby Frazier is an American artist and professor of photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. From Braddock, Pennsylvania, Frazier began photographing her family and hometown at the age of 16, revising the social documentary traditional of Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange to imagine documentation from within and by the community, and collaboration between the photographer and her subjects. Inspired by Gordon Parks, who promoted the camera as a weapon for social justice, Frazier uses her tight focus to make apparent the impact of systemic problems, from racism to deindustrialization to environmental degradation, on individual bodies, relationships and spaces. In her work, she is concerned with bringing to light these problems, which she describes as global issues.

Andrea Geyer

Andrea Geyer

Andrea Geyer is a German and American multi-disciplinary artist who lives and works in New York City. With a particular focus on those who identify or at some point were identified as women, her works use photography, performance, video, drawing and painting to activate the lingering potential of specific events, sites, or biographies. Geyer focus on the themes of gender, class, national identity and how they are constantly negotiated and reinterpreted against a frequent backdrop of cultural meanings and memories. Geyer has exhibited at institutions such as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), MOMA, and The Whitney Museum.

Ken Gonzales-Day

Ken Gonzales-Day

Ken Gonzales-Day is a Los Angeles-based conceptual artist best known for interdisciplinary projects that examine the historical construction of race, identity, and systems of representation including lynching photographs, museum display and street art. His widely exhibited "Erased Lynching" photographic series and book, Lynching in the West: 1850-1935 (2006), document the absence in historical accounts of the lynching of Latinos, Native Americans and Asians in California's early history. The series has toured in traveling exhibitions staged by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Smithsonian Institution and Minnesota Museum of American Art, and appeared at the Tamayo Museum, Generali Foundation (Vienna) and Palais de Tokyo in Paris, among other venues.

Heather Hart

Heather Hart

Heather T. Hart is a visual artist who works in a variety of media including interactive and participatory Installation art, drawing, collage, and painting. She is a co-founder of the Black Lunch Table Project, which includes a Wikipedia initiative focused on addressing diversity representation in the arts on Wikipedia.

Governance

Funding

As of March 2011, the Whitney's endowment was $207 million; the museum expected to raise $625 million from its capital campaign by 2015.[36] As of June 2016, the endowment had grown to $308 million.[37]

Historically, the operating performance has been essentially breakeven.[38] The museum restricts the use of its endowment fund for yearly operating expenses to 5% of the fund's value.[13] The Whitney has historically depended on private collectors and donors for acquisitions of new art.[39] In 2008, Leonard A. Lauder gave the museum $131 million, the biggest donation in the Whitney's history.[39][40] Donations for new purchases dropped to $1.3 million in 2010 from $2.7 million in 2006.[36]

Directors

The museum's director is Adam D. Weinberg (since 2003). Former directors include Maxwell L. Anderson (1998–2003), David A. Ross (1991–1997), Thomas Armstrong III (1974–1990), and Juliana Rieser Force (1931–1948).[41]

Board of trustees

For years, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney supported the museum single-handedly, as did her daughter, Flora Whitney Miller, after her, and until 1961, its board was largely family-run. Flora Payne Whitney served as a museum trustee, then as vice president. From 1942 to 1974, she was the museum's president and chair, after which she served as honorary chair until her death in 1986. Her daughter Flora Miller Biddle served as president until 1995. Her book The Whitney Women and the Museum They Made was published in 1999.[42]

In 1961, the need for outside support finally forced the board to add outside trustees, including bankers Roy Neuberger and Arthur Altschul. David Solinger became the Whitney's first outside president in 1966.[16]

  • Leonard A. Lauder, Chairman Emeritus of the Board of Trustees
  • Flora Miller Biddle, Honorary Chairman of the Board of Trustees
  • Robert J. Hurst, Co-Chair of the Board of Trustees
  • Brooke Garber Neidich, Co-Chair of the Board of Trustees
  • Neil Bluhm, President of the Board of Trustees
  • Adam D. Weinberg, Alice Pratt Brown Director of the Whitney
  • John Stanley, Chief Operating Officer

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Adam D. Weinberg

Adam D. Weinberg

Adam D. Weinberg is an art museum curator and director. He has been the Alice Pratt Brown Director of the Whitney Museum of American Art since October 1, 2003.

Maxwell L. Anderson

Maxwell L. Anderson

Maxwell L. Anderson is an American art historian, museum director, author, and non-profit executive, who currently serves as President of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation. Anderson served as director of the Indianapolis Museum of Art from 2006 to 2011 and the Dallas Museum of Art from 2011 to 2015.

Flora Payne Whitney

Flora Payne Whitney

Flora Payne Whitney, also known as Flora Whitney Miller, was an American artist and socialite, art collector, and patron of the arts.

Flora Miller Biddle

Flora Miller Biddle

Flora Miller Biddle is an American author, honorary chairman, and former president of the Whitney Museum of American Art, serving from 1977 to 1995. She is the granddaughter of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, the founder of the Whitney Museum.

Roy Neuberger

Roy Neuberger

Roy Rothschild Neuberger was an American financier who contributed money to raise public awareness of modern art through his acquisition of pieces he deemed worthy. He was a co-founder of the investment firm Neuberger Berman. Roy Neuberger served for several decades as Honorary Trustee, Benefactor, and member of the Department of Modern Art's Visiting Committee at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Arthur Altschul

Arthur Altschul

Arthur Goodhart Altschul was an American banker and a Goldman Sachs Group partner, and executive at his private family office, Overbrook Management Corporation, founded by his father.

David Solinger

David Solinger

David M. Solinger was a lawyer, art collector, and president of the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Neil Bluhm

Neil Bluhm

Neil Gary Bluhm is an American billionaire real estate and casino magnate. He is a partner of Midwest Gaming & Entertainment, which owns several casinos. He had an estimated net worth of US$7 billion in October 2021.

Criticism

Banners from April 5, 2019, protest by Decolonize This Place at the Whitney Museum, New York NY, over board vice chair Warren Kanders' ownership of Safariland, a manufacturer of tear gas and other weapons
Banners from April 5, 2019, protest by Decolonize This Place at the Whitney Museum, New York NY, over board vice chair Warren Kanders' ownership of Safariland, a manufacturer of tear gas and other weapons

The Board of Trustees has come under criticism since November 2018 by groups including Decolonize This Place, the Chinatown Art Brigade, and W.A.G.E., for vice chair Warren B. Kanders' ownership of the company Safariland, which manufactured tear gas used against the late-2018 migrant caravans;[43] 120 scholars and critics published an open letter to the Whitney Museum asking for the removal of Kanders from the museum board; additional signatories after the letter's initial posting included almost 50 artists who have been selected for the 2019 Whitney Biennial.[44] A series of nine weeks of protest by Decolonize This Place highlighted the use of Safariland weapons against protestors and others in Palestine and other places.[45]

On July 17, 2019, calls for Kanders's resignation were renewed following Artforum's publication of an essay, "The Tear Gas Biennial", by Hannah Black, Ciarán Finlayson, and Tobi Haslett.[46] On July 19, four artists (Korakrit Arunanondchai, Meriem Bennani, Nicole Eisenman, and Nicholas Galanin) published a letter, also in Artforum, asking their work to be withdrawn from the exhibition.[47] (The first artist to withdraw was Michael Rakowitz, who withdrew his work before the Biennial opened.) A day later, a second wave of artists (Eddie Arroyo, Christine Sun Kim, Agustina Woodgate, and Forensic Architecture) also withdrew.[48]

On July 25, 2019, Warren B. Kanders announced his resignation from the Board of Trustees of the Whitney Museum.[49] Kanders cited no wish to play a role in the museum's demise and urged fellow trustees to step up and assume leadership of the Whitney.[50]

Discover more about Criticism related topics

Decolonize This Place

Decolonize This Place

Decolonize This Place is a movement based in New York City that organizes around Indigenous rights, black liberation, Palestinian nationalism, de-gentrification, and economic inequality. Their actions often take place at museums and cultural institutions and focus on colonialist tendencies within the art world.

Chinatown Art Brigade

Chinatown Art Brigade

Chinatown Art Brigade (CAB) is a cultural collective of artists, media makers and activists creating art and media to advance social justice. Their work focuses on the belief that "collaboration with and accountability to those communities that are directly impacted by racial, social and economic inequities must be central to cultural, art, or media making process." Through art and public projections, CAB aims to share stories of Chinatown tenants to fight displacement and gentrification. Chinatown Art Brigade collaborates with the Chinatown Tenants Union of CAAAV Organizing Asian Communities, a non-profit organization that fights against tenant rights violation, evictions, and displacement of low-income pan-Asian communities.

Safariland

Safariland

Safariland, LLC is a United States-based manufacturer of personal, and other equipment focused on the law enforcement, public safety, military, and recreational markets. It was formerly a division of the United Kingdom-based defense and aerospace company BAE Systems PLC. Safariland has said that their body armor has protected at least 2,040 police officers who were shot in the line of duty.

Hannah Black

Hannah Black

Hannah Black is a visual artist, critic, and writer. Her work spans video, text and performance. She is best known for her open letter written with Ciarán Finlayson and Tobi Haslett, The Tear Gas Biennial, criticizing co-chair of the board of the Whitney Museum, Warren Kanders, and his toxic philanthropy which comes from selling tear gas and other weapons via Safariland. The letter prompted artists to withdraw works from the 2019 Whitney Biennial.

Korakrit Arunanondchai

Korakrit Arunanondchai

Korakrit Arunanondchai is a video and multimedia artist originally from Bangkok who now splits his time between Brooklyn and Bangkok. He is best known for his 2017 installation, With history in a room filled with people with funny names 4, which received widely positive reviews and was recognized with an award at the International Film Festival Rotterdam.

Meriem Bennani

Meriem Bennani

Meriem Bennani is a Moroccan artist currently based in New York.

Nicole Eisenman

Nicole Eisenman

Nicole Eisenman is French-born American artist known for her oil paintings and sculptures. She has been awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship (1996), the Carnegie Prize (2013), and has thrice been included in the Whitney Biennial. On September 29, 2015, she won a MacArthur Fellowship award for "restoring the representation of the human form a cultural significance that had waned during the ascendancy of abstraction in the 20th century."

Nicholas Galanin

Nicholas Galanin

Nicholas Galanin is a Tlingit and Unangax̂ multi-disciplinary artist and musician from Alaska. His work often explores a dialogue of change and identity between Native and non-Native communities.

Michael Rakowitz

Michael Rakowitz

Michael Rakowitz is an Iraqi-American artist living and working in Chicago. He is best known for his conceptual art shown in non-gallery contexts.

Christine Sun Kim

Christine Sun Kim

Christine Sun Kim is an American sound artist based in Berlin. Working predominantly in drawing, performance, and video, Kim's practice considers how sound operates in society. Musical notation, written language, American Sign Language (ASL), and the use of the body are all recurring elements in her work. Her work has been exhibited in major cultural institutions internationally, including in the Museum of Modern Art's first exhibition about sound in 2013 and the Whitney Biennial in 2019. She was named a TED Fellow in both 2013 and 2015, a Director's Fellow at MIT Media Lab in 2015, and a Ford Foundation Disability Futures Fellow in 2020.

Agustina Woodgate

Agustina Woodgate

Agustina Woodgate is an Argentinian artist who lives and works between Amsterdam and Miami.

Forensic Architecture

Forensic Architecture

Forensic Architecture is a multidisciplinary research group based at Goldsmiths, University of London that uses architectural techniques and technologies to investigate cases of state violence and violations of human rights around the world. The group is led by architect Eyal Weizman. He received a Peabody Award in 2021 for his work with Forensic Architecture.

Source: "Whitney Museum", Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, (2023, March 25th), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitney_Museum.

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References
Citations
  1. ^ "Visitor Figures 2016" (PDF). The Art Newspaper Review. April 2017. p. 14. Retrieved March 23, 2018.
  2. ^ "Whitney Museum of American Art". The Saatchi Gallery. Retrieved April 17, 2016.
  3. ^ "Breuer's Whitney: An Anniversary Exhibition". Whitney Museum of American Art. 1996. p. 4. Retrieved March 12, 2021.
  4. ^ Dunlap, David W. (May 16, 2016). "Art Studios Where Whitney Museum Was Born Will Admit Visitors". New York Times. Retrieved July 12, 2016.
  5. ^ Scott, Andrea K. (March 12, 2016). "Inside the Breuer Building, After the Whitney and Before the MET". The New Yorker. Retrieved July 12, 2016.
  6. ^ The Biography of Wilhelmina Weber Furlong: The Treasured Collection of Golden Heart Farm by Clint B. Weber, ISBN 0-9851601-0-1, ISBN 978-0-9851601-0-4
  7. ^ The Whitney Museum Library archival items number 15405
  8. ^ "Whitney Museum of American Art | History, Collection, New York, & Facts | Britannica".
  9. ^ a b New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission; Dolkart, Andrew S.; Postal, Matthew A. (2009). Postal, Matthew A. (ed.). Guide to New York City Landmarks (4th ed.). New York: John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 978-0-470-28963-1., p.54
  10. ^ Berman, Avis (1990). Rebels on Eighth Street: Juliana Force and the Whitney Museum of American Art. New York: Atheneum. ISBN 9780689120862.
  11. ^ Allen, Greg (September 2, 2010). "MoMA On Fire". greg.org. Retrieved January 26, 2014.
  12. ^ a b Gray, Christopher (November 14, 2010). "The Controversial Whitney Museum". The New York Times.
  13. ^ a b c d Vogel, Carol; Taylor, Kate (April 11, 2010). "Rift in Family as Whitney Plans a Second Home". New York Times.
  14. ^ Anagnost, Adrian (2020). "Decentralize! Art, Power, and Space in the New York Art World". Konsthistorisk Tidskrift/Journal of Art History. 89 (2): 100–125. doi:10.1080/00233609.2020.1758205. S2CID 221065038.
  15. ^ a b Brenson, Michael (February 23, 1986). "Museum And Corporation – A Delicate Balance". New York Times.
  16. ^ a b Glück, Grace (December 4, 1988). "Mogul Power At The Whitney". New York Times.
  17. ^ William Grimes (June 22, 2011), Thomas N. Armstrong III, Museum Chief Who Once Led the Whitney, Dies at 78, New York Times.
  18. ^ Carol Vogel (April 15, 2003), Whitney Scraps Expansion Plans New York Times.
  19. ^ Carol Vogel (May 13, 2003), Director of the Whitney Resigns New York Times.
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  24. ^ Vogel, Carol (June 6, 2013). "The Museum Elevator as Immersive Art". New York Times.
  25. ^ a b c Smith, Roberta (April 30, 2016). "New Whitney Museum Signifies a Changing New York Art Scene". New York Times. Retrieved May 1, 2015.
  26. ^ Brooks, Katherine (May 1, 2015). "12 Things To Search For At The Brand New Whitney Museum". Huffington Post. Retrieved May 2, 2015.
  27. ^ Vogel, Carol (May 11, 2011). "Met Plans to Occupy the Whitney's Uptown Site". New York Times.
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  30. ^ "Collection". whitney.org. Retrieved January 3, 2020.
  31. ^ Lowry, Katharine (June 7, 1976). "The Show Of Muscles At The Whitney Was Vitiated By – 06.07.76 – SI Vault". Sportsillustrated.cnn.com. Retrieved January 8, 2013.
  32. ^ Pogrebin, Robin (January 26, 2011). "The Permanent Collection May Not Be So Permanent". New York Times.
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  37. ^ 2016 Financial Statement Retrieved April 21, 2018
  38. ^ Fitch Rates the Whitney Museum of American Art, (NY) Revenue Bonds 'A'; Outlook Stable Reuters, June 23, 2011.
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  50. ^ Pogrebin, Robin; Harris, Elizabeth A. (July 25, 2019). "Warren Kanders Resigns as Whitney Trustee After Protests Over Tear Gas". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved July 25, 2019.
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