Sculptor Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney founded the museum in 1930 after the Met turned down her collection of American art; its survey of contemporary American work has run since 1932, in its present all-media biennial form since 1973.
The museum moved into a new Renzo Piano-designed building in the Meatpacking District in 2015, with multiple outdoor terraces worth budgeting extra time for.
Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney was a working sculptor before she was a patron, and she ran the Whitney Studio Club from 1914 to 1928 to show American artists nobody else would. With her assistant Juliana Force she had gathered nearly 700 works by 1929, offered more than 500 of them to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and was turned down. The museum she founded instead opened on November 18, 1931 in three converted row houses at 8-12 West 8th Street in Greenwich Village. That origin still shapes the place: it collects living American artists first and sorts out reputations later.
The survey exhibition is the institution's real instrument. It began in 1932 as separate biennials divided by medium, became annuals in 1937, and returned in 1973 to the single all-media biennial that runs today. It is regularly a lightning rod rather than a consensus — the 1993 edition was attacked for foregrounding identity politics, the 2017 edition drew protests over Dana Schutz's painting of Emmett Till, and in 2019 several artists withdrew over a trustee's ties to a tear gas manufacturer. Reading the biennial's history is a fair way to read the last ninety years of argument about American art.
Renzo Piano's building at 99 Gansevoort Street opened on May 1, 2015: eight stories and about 200,000 square feet, including what the museum describes as the city's largest column-free gallery floor, with outdoor terraces on the upper levels linked by an external staircase. It anchors the southern end of the High Line. From 1966 to 2014 the Whitney occupied Marcel Breuer's inverted granite ziggurat on Madison Avenue, a very different proposition.
The collection holds more than 25,000 works by over 3,500 artists, and the museum is the largest repository of Edward Hopper's paintings and archival material anywhere.
99 Gansevoort St, New York, NY 10014 · Official site ↗
The Whitney Museum of American Art is a modern and contemporary American art museum in the Meatpacking District and West Village neighborhoods of Manhattan in New York City, New York, United States. The institution was founded in 1930 by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, a prominent American socialite, sculptor, and art patron after whom it is named.
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