Ground zero for new trends in American art
The Whitney in New York is dedicated to 20th-century and contemporary American art, with a special focus on works by living artists. Its permanent collection holds over 26,000 works created by more than 3,900 artists and important figures such as Jasper Johns, Jay DeFeo, Glenn Ligon, Cindy Sherman and Paul Thek were all given their first museum surveys here. The museum was the first in New York to give a major exhibition to a video artist (Nam June Paik, in 1982) and its renowned biennial is the country’s leading survey of the most recent developments in American art.
The museum’s namesake and founder, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, was a sculptor and art patron who, between 1907–1929 acquired more than 500 works by American artists. She also created the Whitney Studio in Greenwich Village in 1914 to help living practitioners exhibit their work. After her offer to gift her collection to the Metropolitan Museum of Art was declined, she set up her own institution, which first opened in 1931 near Fifth Avenue. The museum has moved since: to West 54th Street in 1954; to a Marcel Breuer-designed building on Madison Avenue in 1963, and finally to its current Renzo Piano-designed building in 2015.
Read Less
