Whitney Museum of American Art
Museum of twentieth and twenty-first century American art in a Renzo Piano building beside the High Line.
The Whitney was founded in 1930 by the sculptor and patron Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, who had been collecting the work of living American artists since the previous decade. It opened first in Greenwich Village, moved to West 54th Street in 1954, and in 1966 occupied Marcel Breuer's inverted granite ziggurat on Madison Avenue. In 2015 the museum relocated to the Meatpacking District, where Renzo Piano designed a nine-storey structure of steel, concrete and glass at the southern end of the High Line, beside the Hudson River.
The collection holds more than twenty-six thousand works by around three thousand five hundred artists, with substantial groups by Edward Hopper, Georgia O'Keeffe, Alexander Calder and Jasper Johns. The fifth floor carries an 18,000-square-foot column-free gallery, the largest of its kind in New York, while stepped outdoor terraces on the eastern side overlook the High Line. The museum also mounts the Whitney Biennial, begun as an annual survey in 1932 and the longest-running exhibition of contemporary art in the United States.
Highlights
- Column-free fifth-floor gallery, the largest of its kind in the city
- Outdoor terraces on floors five to eight overlooking the High Line
- Extensive holdings of Edward Hopper paintings, drawings and prints
- The Whitney Biennial, running as a survey since 1932
