Whitney Museum of American Art New York City.com : Profile

Arts & Attractions Whitney Museum of American Art

A world famous center of American Art, the Whitney Museum's Permanent Collection is situated in its new building in lower Manhattan. Designed by architect Renzo Piano and abutting the High Line park, the building vastly increases exhibition and programming space and provide a comprehensive view of its vast collection of modern and contemporary American art.

Since the Museum's opening in 1931, the collection has grown to more than 21,000 paintings, sculptures, prints, drawings, and photographs, representing over 3,000 individual artists and providing the most complete overview of twentieth-century American art of any museum in the world. At its core are Museum founder Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney’s personal holdings, totaling some 600 works when the Museum opened in 1931. These works served as the basis for the founding collection, which Mrs. Whitney continued to add to throughout her lifetime. The founding collection reflects Mrs. Whitney’s ardent support of living American artists of the time, particularly younger or emerging ones, including Peggy Bacon, George Bellows, Stuart Davis, Charles Demuth, Mabel Dwight, Edward Hopper, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Reginald Marsh, and John Sloan. This focus on the contemporary, along with a deep respect for artists’ creative process and vision, has guided the Museum’s collecting ever since.

The collection begins with Ashcan School painting and follows the major movements of the twentieth century in America, with strengths in Modernism and Social Realism, Precisionism, Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, Minimalism, Postminimalism, art centered on identity and politics that came to the fore in the 1980s and 1990s, and contemporary work. The Museum’s signature exhibition is its biennial (and annual, during certain periods) survey of contemporary art, which has always kept the focus on the present, in the spirit of its founder. The highlights of the collection are definitive examples of their type, but there is also much variety and originality in works by less well-known figures. The collection includes all mediums; over eighty percent is works on paper.

The Whitney has deep holdings of the work of certain key artists, spanning their careers and the mediums in which they worked, including Alexander Calder, Mabel Dwight, Jasper Johns, Glenn Ligon, Brice Marden, Reginald Marsh, Agnes Martin, Georgia O’Keeffe, Claes Oldenburg, Ed Ruscha, Cindy Sherman, Lorna Simpson, and David Wojnarowicz.

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Meatpacking District Description

Whitney Museum of American Art is located in the Meatpacking District neighborhood of Manhattan. The Meatpacking District owes its name to the meat distribution companies that once dominated the area. While some meatpacking houses still exist, nowadays you are more likely to find meat of the celebrity variety, twirling around the Bermuda Triangle of SoHo House, Spice Market, and the uber-swanky Hotel Gansevoort. The signature feature of this luxurious hotel is its rooftop, featuring a richly landscaped roof garden and an expansive loft with soaring 20-foot ceilings that offers breathtaking city views in three directions. A 45-foot outdoor heated pool with underwater music anchors the roof's other side; it is unique in New York and reflects the ultra-trendiness that the district prides itself on.

If it's Asian cuisine you’re craving you’ll definitely want to dine at Spice Market. The interior of the restaurant is as exotic as the cuisine: with a collection of artifacts imported from Rajastan, South India, Burma and Malaysia creating an interior of Eastern exotica including antique wall carvings, screens and pagodas. Spice Market provides a feast for all sense.

Some art galleries have opened here, but the area is dominated by late-night establishments, high-end furniture stores, and fabulously expensive hairdressers. If you seek thrilling nightlife and pulsating action on the streets with traffic jams over century-old cobblestone streets, head here Cielo is one of hottest nightclubs. Its intimate size, impressive sound and sunken dance-floor make it perfect for catching a set by the latest hipster DJ. But given its notorious reputation as one of New York's toughest club to enter, good luck getting by the door. Speaking of tough doors, you might miss APT's door entirely, as the swanky lounge resides in a nondescript building that could easily be mistaken for a butcher shop. For more nightlife action, try the glittery, subterranean club that is 675 Bar. If you're looking for a quieter, more low-key way to spend time in the district, keep in mind that one of the most pleasant times of day to visit this neighborhood is between 10 and 11 in the morning.

As you wander around the district, do head down Gansevoort Street to get a feel for how this neighborhood evolved. The now-defunct Florent restaurant was the first trendy place to open, and as you pass its old location on Gansevoort Street, you'll see the remnants of the old dilapidated elevated railway, which has been turned into America's first overhead park, called the High Line. West 14th Street between Ninth and Tenth Avenues should not be missed, replete with stylish boutiques such as Jeffrey, a few bakeries, and an enormous Bodum store as well. And then there's the legendary Old Homestead Steakhouse directly across from the new Apple Store on Ninth Avenue at West 14th Street. If you're curious about the intriguing new architecture and glass houses juxtaposed with meatpacking houses, you'll definitely want to follow this section of our new architecture of Manhattan walking tour.

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The Whitney's Collection

In 1931, before the Whitney Museum of American Art opened to the public, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney made a gift that became the basis of the institution’s holdings of modern art. Her devotion to the work of living artists has defined how the Whitney has developed ever since.

Jacob Lawrence, Geor... [ + ]gia O'Keeffe, Willem de Kooning, and Ed Ruscha are just a few of the American innovators on view in this presentation of works from the Whitney's collection. This exhibition highlights four broad themes that underscore the key developments of twentieth-century art in America: "Form Building, Form Breaking," "City and Machine," "The Figure and Its Realities," and "Mind, Body, Gesture." While these developments are grounded in historical periods, their qualities and ideas also overlap and connect, extending into the work of living artists who found new ways to apply them to creative expression.

08/14/2022 11:00 AM

Sun, August 14

11:00AM