More about Whitney Museum of American Art
Works at Whitney Museum of American Art
Sr. Editor
An awesome museum if you like contemporary stuff. Every couple years they have the Whitney Biennial, where lesser known artists come to show off their goods in hopes of hitting it big. The event is super entertaining because there is lots of weird performance art. In the 1976 there was an exhibit of live body builders, starring California’s own Governator Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Contributor
The Whitney Museum of American Art sticks out.
The Museum moved to the Meatpacking district in 2015, fulfilling a kind of gentrification prophecy. In the '70s the neighborhood was a thriving meat market, in the '80s it was dotted with BDSM clubs, in the '90s artists started moving in, and so on and so forth.
Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney was a sculptor who didn’t get taken very seriously. Well, she was the great-granddaughter of the one, the only, Vanderbilt Rail tycoon. That kind of money and the wrong set of genitals ensured her humiliation in the art world. Her husband was no help either, and she even learned later that he was having an affair. Due to the prejudices of the time, Gertrude had to work under a false name to get work.
In 1907, Gertrude set up a studio/cafe/residence at 8-12 West 8th street in Greenwich Village, Manhattan. She used the space to sculpt, live, and have other artists meet up and chat. Early bohemian life sounds like a lot of fun.
When the Metropolitan Museum of Art refused to accept a generous gift of 500 paintings from her collection, she was upset. So, she did what any Tommy Wiseau would do. She built her own museum.
The museum moved two more times before it arrived at the Meatpacking district in New York.
The Whitney is populated by some of the most important artworks in America’s modern history. They deal with a lot of contemporary art, but you will definitely find work by Georgia O’Keeffe, Edward Hopper, and Jean Michel Basquiat lining the gallery walls.
A rich lady sculptor, married to an asshole husband, created a legacy that simply keeps on giving. We need a lot of different people to change this world. Next time you’re in NYC, just go have a look at what this artist started. The Museum shuts at 6 in the evening, so we recommend you get there around 4, at the latest. It's big.
Sources
Sources
- "From Glory Holes to Gentrification: NY's Meatpacking District." Air Design. April 11, 2019. Accessed June 15, 2019. https://www.airdesign.co.uk/from-glory-holes-to-gentrification-nys-meat….
- Schultz, Dennison. "Women's History Month: Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney." Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. March 31, 2017. Accessed July 04, 2019. https://crystalbridges.org/blog/womens-history-month-gertrude-vanderbil…
- Ro, Lauren. "Original Home of Whitney Museum to Open to the Public for First Time in History." Curbed. May 18, 2016. Accessed July 04, 2019. https://www.curbed.com/2016/5/18/11701924/gertrude-vanderbilt-whitney-s…
- Schwiegershausen, Erica. "The Iconoclastic Woman Who Founded the Whitney." The Cut. May 01, 2015. Accessed June 18, 2019. https://www.thecut.com/2015/05/iconoclastic-woman-who-founded-the-whitn….
- "Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney." Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney | Whitney Museum of American Art. Accessed June 18, 2019. https://whitney.org/collection/works/6564.
Featured Content
Here is what Wikipedia says about 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.
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 museum is the largest repository of Edward Hopper's artwork and archival materials in the world), the Sanborn Hopper Archive, and the Arshile Gorky Research Collection, among others.
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.
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. 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". 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.
Check out the full Wikipedia article about Whitney Museum
