Whitney Museum
The Whitney Museum of American Art, known informally as "The Whitney", is a modern and contemporary American art museum located in the Meatpacking District and West Village neighborhoods of Manhattan in New York City. The institution was originally founded in 1930 by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (1875–1942), a prominent American socialite, sculptor, and art patron after whom it is named.
Established
The Whitney focuses on collecting and preserving 20th- and 21st-century American art. Its permanent collection, spanning the late-19th century to the present, comprises more than 25,000 paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, photographs, films, videos, and artifacts of new media by more than 3,500 artists. It places particular emphasis on exhibiting the work of living artists as well as maintaining institutional archives of historical documents pertaining to modern and contemporary American art, including the Edward and Josephine Hopper Research Collection, the Sanborn Hopper Archive, and the Arshile Gorky Research Collection, among others.[2]
From 1966 to 2014, the Whitney was located at 945 Madison Avenue on Manhattan's Upper East Side in a building designed by Marcel Breuer and Hamilton P. Smith. The museum closed in October 2014 to relocate to its current building, which was designed by Renzo Piano at 99 Gansevoort Street and opened on May 1, 2015, expanding the museum exhibition space to 50,000 square feet.[3]
The museum organizes the Whitney Biennial, a bi-annual exhibition showcasing the work of emerging American artists, considered the longest-running and most important survey of contemporary art in the United States.[4][5][6] The museum also heads the Whitney Independent Study Program, which began in 1968, to support artists, critics and art historians by "encouraging the theoretical and critical study of the practices, institutions, and discourses that constitute the field of culture".[7][8] In 2023, with 768,000 visitors, the Whitney was the 26th most-visited museum in the United States and the 89th most-visited art museum in the world.[9]
The Frances Mulhall Achilles Library is a research library originally built on the collections of books and papers of founder Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, and the Whitney Museum's first director, Juliana Force. The library operates in the West Chelsea area of New York City.[42] It contains Special Collections and the Whitney Museum Archives. The archives[43] contain the Institutional Archives, Research Collections, and Manuscript Collections. The Special Collections consist of artists' books, portfolios, photographs, titles in the Whitney Fellows Artist and Writers Series (1982–2001), posters, and valuable ephemera that relate to the permanent collection. The Institutional Archives include exhibition records, photographs, curatorial research notes, artist's correspondence, audio and video recordings, and trustees' papers from 1912 to the present.
Highlights:
Books and materials in the library can be accessed in the museum's database.[42]
Governance[edit]
Funding[edit]
As of March 2011, the Whitney's endowment was $207 million; the museum expected to raise $625 million from its capital campaign by 2015.[45] As of June 2016, the endowment had grown to $308 million.[46]
Historically, the operating performance has been essentially breakeven.[47] The museum restricts the use of its endowment fund for yearly operating expenses to 5% of the fund's value.[21] The Whitney has historically depended on private collectors and donors for acquisitions of new art.[48] In 2008, Leonard A. Lauder gave the museum $131 million, the biggest donation in the Whitney's history.[48][49] Donations for new purchases dropped to $1.3 million in 2010 from $2.7 million in 2006.[45]
Directors[edit]
The museum's director is Scott Rothkopf (since 2023).[2] Former directors include Adam D. Weinberg (2003–2023), Maxwell L. Anderson (1998–2003), David A. Ross (1991–1997), Thomas Armstrong III (1974–1990), and Juliana Force (1931–1948).[50]
Board of trustees[edit]
For years, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney supported the museum single-handedly, as did her daughter, Flora Whitney Miller, after her, and until 1961, its board was largely family-run. Flora Payne Whitney served as a museum trustee, then as vice president. From 1942 to 1974, she was the museum's president and chair, after which she served as honorary chair until her death in 1986. Her daughter Flora Miller Biddle served as president until 1995. Her book The Whitney Women and the Museum They Made was published in 1999.[51]
In 1961, the need for outside support finally forced the board to add outside trustees, including bankers Roy Neuberger and Arthur Altschul. David Solinger became the Whitney's first outside president in 1966.[24]
