About Us:
As the preeminent institution devoted to the art of the United States, the Whitney Museum of American Art presents the full range of twentieth-century and contemporary American art, with a special focus on works by living artists. The Whitney is dedicated to collecting, preserving, interpreting, and exhibiting American art, and its collection arguably the finest holding of twentieth-century American art in the world—is the Museum’s key resource. The Museum’s signature exhibition, the Biennial, is the country’s leading survey of the most recent developments in American art.
Innovation has been a hallmark of the Whitney since its beginnings. It was the first museum dedicated to the work of living American artists and the first New York museum to present a major exhibition of a video artist (Nam June Paik in 1982). Such figures as Jasper Johns, Cy Twombly, and Cindy Sherman were given their first museum retrospectives by the Whitney. The Museum has consistently purchased works within the year they were created, often well before the artists became broadly recognized. The Whitney was the first museum to take its exhibitions and programming beyond its walls by establishing corporate-funded branch facilities, and the first museum to undertake a program of collection-sharing (with the San Jose Museum of Art) in order to increase access to its renowned collection.
The Whitney is constructing a new building in downtown Manhattan, which will open to the public in spring 2015. Designed by architect Renzo Piano and situated between the High Line and the Hudson River, the building will vastly increase the Whitney’s exhibition and programming space, providing the first comprehensive view of its unsurpassed collection of modern and contemporary American art.
Congratulations to Eamon Ore-Giron on his participation in the 2024 Whitney Biennial. The exhibition, titled Even Better Than the Real Thing, will run from March 20 through August 11 at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Organized by…
Read More »Using humor, intimacy, and direct address with distinct visual and sculptural forms, Every Ocean Hughes’s (formerly known as Emily Roysdon; b. 1977, Easton, MD; lives and works between Easton and Stockholm) current series of works are…
Read More »Drawn from the Whitney’s collection and including video, animation, sculpture, and augmented reality, the works in Refigured reflect on interactions between digital and physical materiality. Sculptures are simultaneously physical and virtual,…
Read More »This exhibition is the first New York retrospective of Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (b. 1940, citizen of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation), an overdue but timely look at the work of a groundbreaking artist. Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Memory…
Read More »Josh Kline (b. 1979, Philadelphia, PA; lives and works in New York, NY) is one of the leading artists of his generation. Kline is best known for creating immersive installations using video, sculpture, photography, and design to question how…
Read More »At the Dawn of a New Age: Early Twentieth-Century American Modernism showcases art produced between 1900 and 1930 by well-known American modernists and their now largely forgotten, but equally groundbreaking peers. Drawn primarily from the…
Read More »For Edward Hopper, New York was a city that existed in the mind as well as on the map, a place that took shape through lived experience, memory, and the collective imagination. It was, he reflected late in life, “the American city that I know…
Read More »In the Balance: Between Painting and Sculpture, 1965–1985 brings together artworks from the Whitney's collection that cross boundaries and upset conventions. Regardless of whether they pour across or sit on the floor, the sculptures included…
Read More »2 Lizards, a film by artists Meriem Bennani (b. 1988, Rabat, Morocco; lives and works in New York, NY) and Orian Barki (b. 1985, Israel; lives and works in New York, NY), depicts a surrealist view of the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic as it…
Read More »no existe un mundo poshuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria is organized to coincide with the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Maria—a high-end Category 4 storm that hit Puerto Rico on September 20, 2017. The exhibition…
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