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Whitney Museum of American Art

New York, United States of America
Official website: Whitney Museum of American Art

945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street
New York, NY 10021
General Information: (212) 570-3600

From the website: “The Whitney Museum houses one of the world’s foremost collections of twentieth-century American art. The Permanent Collection of some 12,000 works encompasses paintings, sculptures, multimedia installations, drawings, prints, and photographs — and is still growing. The Museum was founded in 1931 with a core group of 700 art objects, many of them from the personal collection of founder Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney; others were purchased by Mrs. Whitney at the time of the opening to provide a more thorough overview of American art in the early decades of the century. Mrs. Whitney favored the art of the revolutionary artists derisively called the Ashcan School, among them John Sloan, George Luks, and Everett Shinn, as well as realists such as Edward Hopper and American Scene painters John Steuart Curry and Thomas Hart Benton. Her initial gift, however, also comprised many important works by early modernists — Stuart Davis, Charles Demuth, Charles Sheeler, Max Weber, and others. Virtually all the works collected by the Museum for the next twenty years came through the generosity of Mrs. Whitney.”

“Although the Whitney’s acquisition budget was always rather modest, the Museum made the most of its resources by purchasing the work of living artists, particularly those who were young and not well known. It has been a long-standing tradition of the Whitney to purchase works from the Museum’s Annual and Biennial exhibitions, which began in 1932 as a showcase for recent American art. A number of the Whitney’s masterpieces came from these exhibitions, including works by Arshile Gorky, Stuart Davis, Reginald Marsh, Philip Guston, and Jasper Johns. Even today, the Museum continues to enrich its Permanent Collection via the Biennial; among the recent acquisitions are works by Mike Kelley, Matthew Barney, Louise Bourgeois, Zoe Leonard, Matthew Ritchie, and Shahzia Sikander.”

Discrepant Abstraction discussed Black artists’ exhibitions at the Whitney, in Kellie Jones, ‘It’s Not Enough to Say “Black is Beautiful” ‘: Abstraction at the Whitney, 1969-1974, in Discrepant Abstraction, inIVA and MIT Press, 2006.