Whitney Museum of American Art

The Whitney Museum of American Art, known as the “the Whitney”, is an art museum with a focus on 20th and 21st-century American art. The Whitney’s avant-garde permanent collection contains more than 18,000 works in a wide variety of media. The Whitney has always placed a particular emphasis on exhibiting the work of living artists for its collection as well as maintaining an extensive permanent collection containing many important pieces from the first half of the century. The museum’s Annual and Biennial exhibitions have long been a showcase for younger and less well-known artists .

Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, the museum’s namesake and founder, was a well-regarded sculptor as well as a serious art collector. As a patron of the arts, she had already achieved some success as the creator of the “Whitney Studio Club,” a New York-based exhibition space she created in 1918 to promote the works of avant-garde and unrecognized American artists. With her assistant, Juliana Force, Whitney collected nearly 700 works of American art when she offered to donate it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1929 the Met declined . With the Met not interested and the apparent favoritism for European modernism at the Museum of Modern Art. Whitney opened her own museum, exclusively for American Art, in 1931.

The Whitney is housed Marcel Breuer’s unique structure on Madison Avenue and is considered probably the greatest collection of 20th Century American Art. The Museum hosts renowned works of Edward Hopper and Georgia O’Keefe as well as works of Alexander Calder and George Seagal.

Whitney Museum of American Art is located at 945 Madison Avenue,New York, NY 10021 phone (212) 570-3600

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